Agilent 54835A scope (4 channel 1GHz / 4Gs/s) repair & uphack

[nctnico]

I have been hunting for a 1GHz+ scope for over half a year. I prefered one which has a high enough samplerate to do this in a single shot. Ofcourse it is 'easy' to spend several $k on a Lecroy Wavepro 7000 series or something similar but I didn't want to spend that much and avoid too much overlap with the oscilloscopes I already have. The older Lecroy LC584 is also interesting and I nearly got one but the Ebay seller bailed out on me (I did got a refund though). I also looked at the Tektronix TDS694C and TDS784 but the problem with these scopes is that they are older than the Agilent 54835A, have an obsolete NVRAM (SRAM + battery) inside and need special calibration software. The 54835A OTOH can calibrate itself using the auxilary output so it doesn't depend on calibrations values or options stored in a NVRAM. Big plus! My main application for the 54835A is looking at high frequency signals (digital and analog). The 54835A has a maximum depth of 65kpts on 2 channels and 32kpts on 4 channels and no peak-detect. I guess that if you don't want to spend much then deep memory and peak-detect are out of the window. OTOH the 54835A has a lot of tools for signal analysis like FFT, color grading and stacked/chained math functions.

After some haggling and waiting I got this one from an Ebay seller called express_test:


First I would like to point to this nice page with a different repair job on a similar scope: http://www.dasarodesigns.com/projects/fixing-an-hp-agilent-54845a-infinium-oscilloscope/ It has many details on the circuits.

The most appearant problem is that it doesn't boot but otherwise it is a complete mistery. The upside is that the hard drive is detected which means it spins up and likely still has the software on it.

I opened it first to check whether all the wiring is connected and there are no potential safety issues.

Some pictures of the inside. First the part where the PC lives. Inside there is a VA503-A Super Socket 7 motherboard from FIC with an AMD K6-2 400MHz processor and 64MB of SDRAM memory.


The acquisition board is at the underside. This is also where most of the airflow is directed.


Time for firing it up for the first time. With a PS/s keyboard connected I got passed the BIOS error message and after a short while the firmware started. The scope runs on Windows 98 (first edition). After a quick check it turned out (only) channel 2 is not working. All in all the noise isn't as bad as I had expected seeing the two 120mm fans. The high pitched whining noise from the hard drive is way more irritating.

Time to take try and fix it
Changing the battery (which was empty) helped to get rid of the BIOS error and made the scope boot without needing to press a key. Note the bodge capacitor!


The first thing I wanted to try is to swap the attenuators. From the service manual I learned that the probe connector panel had to come off before the BNCs of the attenuators can be unbolted. Unfortunately this means peeling the sticker off before the screws which hold the panel can be reached. That didn't work out very well:



I think it will still look reasonable when put back together again.

Some further disassembly:



A spark plug socket for a socket wrench fits nicely on the BNC's nuts BTW.

After swapping the attenuators it turned out the problem still persisted. Not happy! In the next step I swapped the ADC hybrids between channel 1 and 2:



The ADC hybrids are connected to the board using some sort of socket with pogo-pins (spring loaded pins) which make contact between the ADC hybrid and the board. Ofcourse I cleaned everything with alcohol. Still no luck though. The problem moved with the ADC hybrid. In a final attempt to rule out any other problem I cross connected the attenuator outputs using SMA cables.


Still no go so the only conclusion is that the ADC hybrid which is now on channel 1 is broken. I managed to source a module for (what I think) is a reasonable price but I have not received it yet.

After this I ran a full diagnostic which also pointed to some errors in the trigger circuit. Maybe it has been damaged because a piece of shielding metal wasn't fixed to the frame. Here is a picture which shows the shied re-attached to the frame using some M3 screws:


When browsing on the hard drive I found an interesting help file: HP4XS.HLP . This seems to contain a partial guide to do component level diagnostics/repairs. Hopefully it is helpful if it turns out the trigger circuit is really defective.

Cleaning
With nothing else to do let's give the outside a thourough cleaning to get rid of the grease marks and sticker residu. Much better if I may so so:


Hard drive image
I have not been able to find any older versions of the software for this oscilloscope so I made a backup using Ghost. For this I needed to connect an extra hard drive. The problem is that there are no power extension leads to do this so I made one out of the wires from an old AT power supply. The VA503-A motherboard has both AT and ATX style power connectors and the AT one isn't used but suitable to drain some power from.

After this creating an image was easy.

Rubber fan mountings
The rubber fan mountings where completely perished and I have a bag of leftover cable glands.


I like to think this made an improvement.

Time for some uphacking!
I already knew from the service manual that the hardware for the 54835A, 54845A (1.5GHz 8Gs/s) and 54846A (2.25GHz / 8Gs/s) is exactly the same so there had to be some option strappings to set the model. Forum member Jwalling pointed me towards some resistors on the acquisition board which set the type of oscilloscope. The bad thing is that these resistors are on the solder side of the acquisition board so I had to take the entire board out.

The board is covered with a rubber-ish RF shielding slab.

After removing the RF shielding:


When glancing over the board something odd caught my eye and I had a WTF! moment:


This chip isn't attached to the board except with one leg! Some flux and solder fixed that but oddly enough it didn't seem to have any effect on the errors the self test showed.

Back to the uphacking part. I located several resistors and decided to attach some switches after a few futile attempts to change the resistors using SMT tweezers.



The scope software can be stopped using ctrl-alt-del which opens up the task manager on Win98 and restarted from the menu so testing all the combinations could be done quickly.

Code: [Select]

R3 R2 R1 R0
-  -  X  X  54835A
X  X  -  -  54845A

X = placed, - = open

I have not found the 54846A mode but I have not included R4 in my test because I didn't spot it when looking for potential candidates. For now I'm fine with the 54845A mode.

There where also two other things on my wishlist: more memory and a faster processor. Much to my surprise FIC still has an FTP server with documentation and BIOS files ftp://ftp.fic.com.tw/motherboard/. How cool is that? From the documentation I learned the maximum memory is 768MB divided over 3 modules of 256MB each. It also should support the AMD K6-3 450MHz processor which (ofcourse) is faster and according to legend among the fastest socket 7 processors ever made. So I went on Ebay and spend $18 +shipping on 3 256MB memory modules and $15 on an AMD K6-3 450MHz. The memory was advertised as new but I got 3 different modules and anti-static bags so I'm quite sure these are pulls. But hey, they where only $6 each. The biggest SDRAM module I had in my pile is 64MB so I guess back then 256MB ones would have been insanely expensive. The AMD K6-3 450MHz however did look brand new:



Installing the memory was straightforward. The processor proved more difficult. First of all I needed to dig up a Pentium-I cooler from my scrap heap because the original heatsink is glued onto the processor. Secondly with the new processor installed and setting the right core voltage & multiplier it wouldn't boot. Drats! After some Google-fu I found a forum message from the beginning of this millenium saying FIC has a beta BIOS version which supports the K6-3 450MHz. I found this in FIC's FTP server with version number JN4116. However the current BIOS version on the motherboard said JN4204 which I couldn't find in FIC's archive so this could be a special Agilent version. I also would expect version 4204 to be newer than 4116. I decided to give it a try and save the old version twice (and check!) before attempting to flash the BIOS with version 4116. End result: BIOS version 4116 works with the AMD K6-3 450MHz and so does the oscilloscope software! The performance increase (waveforms/s) is about 15%.

Running Windows XP
The PC part is powerful enough to run XP. There are three advantages of XP: it supports USB sticks, it runs the processor cooler and it can run the latest version of the software I found. Part of the process is also to install an SSD consisting of an mSata module in an mSata to 44pin IDE converter:

I also needed a CD-ROM drive so I threw that into the mix as well:


While doing this I ran into a problem. The XP installer would get either into a blue screen or it would not recognise the mSata drive. The first problem was caused by a slightly faulty CD-ROM drive the latter because the PCB which converts the 40 pin IDE into 44 pin IDE+power has been designed without any idea about signal integrity:


Using a UDMA IDE cable+seperate 40 to 44pin convert allowed XP to install so on to the software. Installing the software took a while and after installing it, it complained about needing a license. So I also installed the licensing server. After this the software starts but crashes because it can't find a DLL. Also the driver for the acquisition board is missing. I guess a seperate software package is needed which has the driver and a low level interface layer. I have not been able to locate either of those (except from an Ebay seller which asks nearly $500 for it). According to a post from Wuerstchenhund the new software is not a big improvement over the old software so I decided to go for plan B and use Win98 instead. So I saved an image from the XP install and copied the image from the original software onto the SSD.

Windows 98 and the original software seem to work just fine with the converter PCB in the middle so this is the final setup:

BTW: this picture shows another problem I didn't spot until I made this picture!

USB sticks & Win98
I still wanted to be able to use USB sticks to save screendumps and data to. Sure I could use the network for that but USB is easier. After some Googling I found this page http://www.technical-assistance.co.uk/kb/usbmsd98.php which has a software package to install USB stick support on Win98. After installing I had to re-install the driver for the USB sticks I had inserted earlier but after that it worked just fine.

Leaky capacitors!
This picture says it all:


This meant I had to dissasemble the PC part and thus take all the boards and the motherboard out:

I had some new low ESR capacitors lying around and for good measure I added a 4.7uf 100V ceramic.
After putting everything together the scope still worked so I guess the capacitor replacement went OK.

Time for some play
Let's try a 200MHz AM modulated signal first:


Add some color grading in the mix:


Let's try FFT and stacked math functions on a 200MHz FM modulated signal (+/-10MHz FM swing)

The yellow line is the base FFT trace. The green is the max hold and blue is the averaged FFT trace. I have not tried it but it should be possible to have more than one FFT trace.

I checked the risetime from a square wave. When the samplerate is 4Gs/s the (calculated) bandwidth is 1.1GHz. At 8Gs/s the bandwidth is 1.5GHz. Not bad!

What is left is to wait for the ADC hybrid to turn up and see which errors remain after I have fitted it. To be continued...

[alm]

Thanks for that write-up!

Weird that that loose logic IC did not give any self-test errors. Maybe it was just interfacing with the dead ADC module, and hence the failure was being hidden?

I am surprised that upgrading the CPU resulted in an increase in waveform/s. I would have expected that to be handled completely in hardware that writes directly to the screen (DMA).

So there is no difference in the calibration procedure for the various models? I could imagine the adjustments for front-end flatness etc might be different. Nice upgrade, anyway.

Now fingers crossed that replacing the hybrid will indeed fix all the errors. It seems likely, based on the tests that you have performed, but you never know until you try it. It could always be something obscure where one of the surrounding components is marginal, barely working with some hybrids and barely failing with others.

[Tony_G]

In case you need it I saved a copy of the software folders from the Keysight FTP Server (they went missing last time I checked there)

https://1drv.ms/f/s!Amqar8_XQ9Uzj6YhN1xHdM8tQdKMOA

TonyG

[TheSteve]

Great post so far. You know I love a good bandwidth upgrade so I'm looking forward to the updates. 

[Jwalling]

When browsing on the hard drive I found an interesting help file: HP4XS.HLP . This seems to contain a partial guide to do component level diagnostics/repairs. Hopefully it is helpful if it turns out the trigger circuit is really defective.

Very nice find! I wish I knew about that file years ago!!
What on earth made you look through all the help files?

EDIT: I just took a look at some images I've saved off from this series of scopes. Given the same firmware revision, this help hp4xs.hlp file is the same one that's on the 54810A through 54825A scopes. There is also a hp1xs.hlp file, and I believe that this one is used for the lower end scopes up to the 54825A.

[nctnico]

When browsing on the hard drive I found an interesting help file: HP4XS.HLP . This seems to contain a partial guide to do component level diagnostics/repairs. Hopefully it is helpful if it turns out the trigger circuit is really defective.

Very nice find! I wish I knew about that file years ago!!
What on earth made you look through all the help files?

Being bored for 5 minutes and dumb luck made me click that file

[nctnico]

In case you need it I saved a copy of the software folders from the Keysight FTP Server (they went missing last time I checked there)

https://1drv.ms/f/s!Amqar8_XQ9Uzj6YhN1xHdM8tQdKMOA

Thank you! I'm downloading the archive right now. I found the FTP archives too and noticed the files where missing but I assumed my FTP clients where not compatible with the server.

[nctnico]

Update: I managed to update the software to version 4.3 thanks to Tony_G's archive. I see FFT phase has been added to the math functions as well as other minor improvements.

Upgrading from a USB stick instead of the LS120 drive needed some hacking using a hex editor on the oscilloscope program. The upgrade process always loads the upgrade from drive a: and you can't set it look on a different drive  . With help of the hex editor I changed all path (not text) references to a: into e: where the USB stick sits. After that it would load the software from the USB stick and do the upgrade process. I'll have to do the same to go from 4.3 to 4.5.

According to the documentation 4.5 is an incomplete package and meant to be installed on top of 4.3. Since my scope ran version 3.72 it seemed wise to install 4.3 first and then 4.5.

[stj]

you cant use USB on the FIC VA503,
it has the first implementation - v1.0
1.0 is bugged and will not work right.
(hence USB v1.1)

stick a pci card in it for USB function.

one other thing about those boards, most have the pcb pads for a proper mini-din ps2 socket under the full-size din socket and mouse headers.

[Jwalling]

you cant use USB on the FIC VA503,
it has the first implementation - v1.0
1.0 is bugged and will not work right.
(hence USB v1.1)

stick a pci card in it for USB function.

They work fine with thumb drives with the Win98 USB hack. I know because I've done it myself.
It's Win98 first edition that has the problem with USB storage.

[stj]

no, your just getting lucky because your data packets over usb are short.
the via oppollo MVP3 chipset has buggy usb implementation - that's official.

i have that board in a tower - it served me 24/7 for very many years and still acts as a network backup unit.
there really isnt much i dont know about it.
inc the fact it can overclock the cpu at 125MHz if your ram is up to it. (7ns or faster)

[Jwalling]

no, your just getting lucky because your data packets over usb are short.
the via oppollo MVP3 chipset has buggy usb implementation - that's official.

i have that board in a tower - it served me 24/7 for very many years and still acts as a network backup unit.
there really isnt much i dont know about it.
inc the fact it can overclock the cpu at 125MHz if your ram is up to it. (7ns or faster)

One thing I do know: VIA chipsets were always  bug-ridden POS. In short, they suck!
I have a FIC VA-503 motherboard right now I could test with - how would I make the bug manifest itself?

[stj]

transfer lots of data in a single pass.

writing a shitload of stuff to a usb key will often cause the interface to hang after while.
i imagine any streaming devices like tuners will cause absolute chaos.
btw, the first intel chipsets with usb 1.0 had the bug too - it was in the design spec they where supplied with!!!
oops! 

[lukier]

nctnico: is 54835A the same architecture as 54381D (https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/agilent-54831d-modernising/)? I mean does it use the ancient C&T graphic card?

If yes then there should be still some, albeit limited, room for improvement (in the PC department), instead of relying on the Socket7 motherboard that I guess is not really good anymore (performance, bad caps).

LeCroy's are better in that respect, as they only use a single PCI card to communicate with the oscilloscope board so one can upgrade as far as Windows 7 32 bit can get (even i7 Haswell with PCIe to PCI adapter). Other connectivity is pretty standard, LVDS for the LCD (I've upgraded mine to XGA), standard signals for the CCFL inverter and, on WaveRunner 6K, the front panel is just a USB HID device (a bit problematic on newest hardware, doesn't like Intel root hubs, so one must use a separate USB controller).

Maybe, because of different PC integration architecture the CPU processing power is not as important as in LeCroy's case. Still, more modern CPU and motherboard with SATA and USB would be nice I guess. I have no idea how the Agilent software would react to upgraded PC internals though.

[Jwalling]

nctnico: is 54835A the same architecture as 54381D (https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/agilent-54831d-modernising/)? I mean does it use the ancient C&T graphic card?

If yes then there should be still some, albeit limited, room for improvement (in the PC department), instead of relying on the Socket7 motherboard that I guess is not really good anymore (performance, bad caps).

Before anyone starts talking WinXP on the 54810A series. 
The 54830/31/32A/D used 1GHz or 1.2 GHZ Pentium III processors on a newer platform without ISA slots. They did use the same C&T graphics driver chip, though. However, the ACQ controller is newer (In fact the older ACQ controller from the 54810A series is present but only used for power on functions, front panel control, and the scope's video frame buffer) I think upgrading to XP would be a problem as the driver for the ACQ controller would not want to talk to the old ACQ board.

EDIT: And I don't think the pin-out for the ribbon cable is the same anyway...

EDIT2: which wouldn't matter anyway. Duh. You'd have to find an XP driver for the OLD controller.

The picture shows the newer ACQ controller in red, the old one in blue

If one could find a newer motherboard (just to upgrade the hardware for performance) with an ISA slot (For GPIB functionality) it just might work.

[Jwalling]

One other thing -  IME the FIC motherboard won't work with GB Ethernet cards for some reason either. I tried a Realtek 8169 based card which I had Win98 drivers for.

[Jwalling]

Something I've always wondered, but have never figured out. What does the battery powered SRAM on the ACQ controller hold?

I've been too chicken to disconnect the battery from a working scope to find out...

Never seen one that was dead either.

[nctnico]

nctnico: is 54835A the same architecture as 54381D (https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/agilent-54831d-modernising/)? I mean does it use the ancient C&T graphic card?

If yes then there should be still some, albeit limited, room for improvement (in the PC department), instead of relying on the Socket7 motherboard that I guess is not really good anymore (performance, bad caps).

The 54835A uses a C&T CT5550 graphics card. I'm not a fan (understatement) of AMD and VIA but I have to assume HP/ Agilent did some reliability tests before deciding to use this particular motherboard for a high end oscilloscope. I actually found a service note from Agilent from 2005 which describes a recall to replace the existing motherboard with the VA503-A and put a VIN33 (latest hardware version) sticker on the back of the scope. I think upgrading the motherboard can be done but the acquisition and videocard will need a PCI slot. And there is also the limitation of the AT style keyboard connector in the casing and how much power can the power supply deliver? All in all there won't be many options to make the PC part much faster.

@stj: I'll keep an eye open for USB problems. So far USB sticks are working OK and if not then I'm quite sure I have a USB-PCI card somewhere in an old PC.

[lukier]

I think upgrading the motherboard can be done but the acquisition and videocard will need a PCI slot. And there is also the limitation of the AT style keyboard connector in the casing and how much power can the power supply deliver? All in all there won't be many options to make the PC part much faster.

There should be plenty of more modern options, there are Core2Quad motherboards featuring 2 PCI slots. You only have to be brave enough to take a metal nibbler and cut the ATX IO shield opening (I have no idea why Agilent decided to do their own cutouts, seems silly) Often newer processors have better performance/power consumption ratio so I wouldn't worry about the PSU that much (and you've gained some watts by going the SSD route, CD drive can be disconnected as well).

However, maybe Agilent software depends heavily on a particular motherboard and/or BIOS as is the case in some older Tek scopes (which are even worse as they use very custom form factor motherboard).

[free_electron]

no need to peel the front label off to remove that probe interface board.  from inside the scope : between bnc of channel2 and channel3 you will see 2 metal clips. simply press those and the netire pcb including the metal stiffner pops off. you don't need to muck with the screw nor destroy the front panel....


as for the battery ont he interface board : that holds the attenuator click count and the self diagnostic / calibration data. if that bettery goes empty simply rerun the diagnostic.

you can launch scope.exe using the service command  " scope.exe /service" that gives extra options in the self test menu where you can set attenuator click and othe roptions

[stj]

there are 3 in the family,
the 503, the 503A and the 503+
i cant remember the differences,
but one has both AT & ATX power connectors and sockets for both 66MHz 72pin sims, and 100MHz sdr-dims.
(i have that model)

[nctnico]

no need to peel the front label off to remove that probe interface board.  from inside the scope : between bnc of channel2 and channel3 you will see 2 metal clips. simply press those and the netire pcb including the metal stiffner pops off. you don't need to muck with the screw nor destroy the front panel....

I looked again but with the attenuators fitted it is impossible to get to those clips. There is a square hole as well. Maybe that is to be used to push the probe connector panel out. BTW someone before me already peeled the sticker off in the places where it is mostly damaged. Maybe I can get things to improve by melting the glue a little bit.

[Jwalling]

no need to peel the front label off to remove that probe interface board.  from inside the scope : between bnc of channel2 and channel3 you will see 2 metal clips. simply press those and the netire pcb including the metal stiffner pops off. you don't need to muck with the screw nor destroy the front panel....

I looked again but with the attenuators fitted it is impossible to get to those clips. There is a square hole as well. Maybe that is to be used to push the probe connector panel out. BTW someone before me already peeled the sticker off in the places where it is mostly damaged. Maybe I can get things to improve by melting the glue a little bit.

There is a little metal "nub" that you can push out from the inside with a small flat-blade screwdriver. I'd be surprised if there's no info about it in the service guide...
I'll take a picture tomorrow and post it.

Done. The metal nub is highlighted. It's right below the CH3 BNC.
Edit: Crap - that was the 54831B. I'll try again in a bit...

Here it is.

[karkoon]

Nice write up. Thank you.


Typed with thumbs.

[Wuerstchenhund]

Nice write-up and pictures! 

I have been hunting for a 1GHz+ scope for over half a year. I prefered one which has a high enough samplerate to do this in a single shot. Ofcourse it is 'easy' to spend several $k on a Lecroy Wavepro 7000 series or something similar but I didn't want to spend that much and avoid too much overlap with the oscilloscopes I already have. The older Lecroy LC584 is also interesting and I nearly got one but the Ebay seller bailed out on me (I did got a refund though).

Well that's bad. But there should be plenty of similar scopes on the market.

There recently was a WavePro 950 (1Ghz 16GSa/s) for less than £1k on ebay UK (maybe it still is) but I guess it depends on what you wanted to spend.

I also looked at the Tektronix TDS694C and TDS784 but the problem with these scopes is that they are older than the Agilent 54835A, have an obsolete NVRAM (SRAM + battery) inside and need special calibration software. The 54835A OTOH can calibrate itself using the auxilary output so it doesn't depend on calibrations values or options stored in a NVRAM. Big plus!

It's a nice feature, although most newer DSOs shouldn't show a noticeable parameter shift even more than a decade, unless something is broken.

My main application for the 54835A is looking at high frequency signals (digital and analog). The 54835A has a maximum depth of 65kpts on 2 channels and 32kpts on 4 channels and no peak-detect. I guess that if you don't want to spend much then deep memory and peak-detect are out of the window. OTOH the 54835A has a lot of tools for signal analysis like FFT, color grading and stacked/chained math functions.

Don't expect too much, especially on a Windows 98 unit. You get a bit more than with an older InfiniiVision scope, but it shows that these Infiniiums were HP's first attempts at doing a Windows scope. The 54835A was designed as a general purpose bench scope, not as an analysis scope, where its capabilities are more limited. The architecture is really super-slow, but the old Win9x models with Socket7 mobo even managed to strangulate this slow architecture through its even slower PC part (slow and buggy VIA chipset). Also, not all Win9x variants can be upgraded to XP, which is recommended so you can use the later software which contains more functions and lots of bug fixes.

Also, reliability wasn't exactly great on these Infiniiums. We had lots of them and lots of problems with dead ADC hybrids, acquisition board issues, trigger issues, issues with the interface card and dying PSUs. Agilent only really got a handle of that with the successor Infiniium DSO8000/DSO80000.

As other said upgrading isn't easy because of the different interface cards but frankly going beyond the K6-3 450MHz won't offer you much performance improvement as when you go to a P2 or faster the architecture becomes the limiting factor (and the Windows part is only used as display on these scopes). I'd still consider getting a P2 board with ISA slot to get rid of the buggy VIA chipset, though.

Depending on what you want to do, a DSO8104A (which with some patience can be found <$1500) might have been a better option (although even my DSO8064A's BW exceeds 1GHz), as it has a faster architecture without the antique C&T65500 secondary graphics adapter and hardware mixing, runs XP on a late P4 mainboard with PCIe, SATA and fast onboard gfx, is much more reliable, offers up to 128Mpts memory (unlockable via hack) and 32Mpts FFT, and even has Peak Detect which seems to be important for you. Also the XGA touch screen is a notable improvement over the VGA display of the 54800 Series, as traces look cleaner and you can get more information on the screen (although you probably still want to use a mouse).

[nctnico]

Nice write-up and pictures! 

I have been hunting for a 1GHz+ scope for over half a year. I prefered one which has a high enough samplerate to do this in a single shot. Ofcourse it is 'easy' to spend several $k on a Lecroy Wavepro 7000 series or something similar but I didn't want to spend that much and avoid too much overlap with the oscilloscopes I already have. The older Lecroy LC584 is also interesting and I nearly got one but the Ebay seller bailed out on me (I did got a refund though).

Well that's bad. But there should be plenty of similar scopes on the market.

There recently was a WavePro 950 (1Ghz 16GSa/s) for less than £1k on ebay UK (maybe it still is) but I guess it depends on what you wanted to spend.

That was one of the big questions. I have compiled a rather long list with scopes which included the Wavepro 900 series (preferably a 960) and even the Wavepro 7000 but in the end I had to be sensible and look at what unique features an older >1GHz scope would really add to my lab and the answer was: bandwidth and a noisy dog house. So I opted for a model which was relatively small, light and cheap. Spending more would mean buying features I already have. The 54835A is not going to be my daily use scope. I will only switch it on if I need the bandwidth.

[Wuerstchenhund]

That was one of the big questions. I have compiled a rather long list with scopes which included the Wavepro 900 series (preferably a 960) and even the Wavepro 7000 but in the end I had to be sensible and look at what unique features an older >1GHz scope would really add to my lab and the answer was: bandwidth and a noisy dog house.

Oh yes, these scopes are loud, and quite large.

The small and less noisy alternative would be a WaveRunner2 LT584 (1Ghz) but they are somewhat rare (and often vastly overpriced).

So I opted for a model which was relatively small, light and cheap. Spending more would mean buying features I already have.

Makes sense. I know you already have other scopes.

The 54835A is not going to be my daily use scope. I will only switch it on if I need the bandwidth.

I use my DSO8064A as my main scope now, mostly because it's less noisy and a bit smaller than the WavePro 7k. What's annoying though is how expensive active probes are for Infiniium scopes, even 2nd hand.

[snoopy]

Does this help ?

[Jwalling]

transfer lots of data in a single pass.

writing a shitload of stuff to a usb key will often cause the interface to hang after while.
i imagine any streaming devices like tuners will cause absolute chaos.
btw, the first intel chipsets with usb 1.0 had the bug too - it was in the design spec they where supplied with!!!
oops! 

I copied the entire contents (about 105MB)of the \ossetup directory folder to a thumb drive, then did a FC/B to compare the files. No errors. I'd say it's good enough for government work, when the most likely use is saving screenshots and such.

[free_electron]

here is the clip you need to press.

[Jwalling]

here is the clip you need to press.

You can't. the CH3/4 attenuator assy. covers those.

[nctnico]

here is the clip you need to press.

You can't. the CH3/4 attenuator assy. covers those.

Indeed but it seems to vary between the models. The attenuators in my one are fully enclosed in (bulky) metal shielding so there is no way I can get to the clips.

[Jwalling]

here is the clip you need to press.

You can't. the CH3/4 attenuator assy. covers those.

Indeed but it seems to vary between the models. The attenuators in my one are fully enclosed in (bulky) metal shielding so there is no way I can get to the clips.

Exactly. The dual attenuators on the 54835A/45A cover them. On the 54825A and lower, they may be accessible since there's 4 separate ones.

[nctnico]

Time for an update. On the PC part I added another 256MB (I bought 3 memory modules so why not) and disabled swap (virtual memory).

More importantly I received the replacement ADC hybrid today. After swapping it the self tests pass and channel 1 works so now I have 4 working channels. Woohoooo! Time to put everything together!

I bought some standard HP feet with tilt stands but I quickly found out the 54835A uses different feet. I tried to find the right feet on Ebay but couldn't so time to pull out the drill press and drill some extra holes to hold the most common HP feet:








The end result (200MHz signal with FM modulation):


What is interesting is that the probe interface board shows a lot of use on channel 1, a little bit on channel 2 and none on channel 3 and 4. Also the attenuator relay count is very low. Around 4000 on channel 1 and around 2000 on the other channels.

[alm]

Thanks for the update. Great that replacing the hybrid turned out to be a complete fix (which was like 90% likely, but you never know until you try it).

[tautech]

Front panel USB connectivity ?

Could you shoehorn one of those USB drive bay panels in where the the floppy drive is ?

[nctnico]

Front panel USB connectivity ?

Could you shoehorn one of those USB drive bay panels in where the the floppy drive is ?

I thought about that. First of all I have not been able to find USB drive panels which fit into a slimeline 3.5" drive. Secondly and worse: Windows98 starts acting up if I DISconnect the drive. This may have to do with the fact that it isn't a normal floppy drive but a combination between a floppy disk and a 120MB optical drive (pretty amazing how they put all that into such a small space). I think I'll opt for a USB extension cable.

edit: Windows98 starts doing weird things when the LS120 is disconnected

[tautech]

Front panel USB connectivity ?

Could you shoehorn one of those USB drive bay panels in where the the floppy drive is ?

I thought about that. First of all I have not been able to find USB drive panels which fit into a slimeline 3.5" drive.

Yep, slimline will probably be hard to find but keep an eye out for something proprietary from HP, Dell or similar PC's.

[nctnico]

Thanks for the update. Great that replacing the hybrid turned out to be a complete fix (which was like 90% likely, but you never know until you try it).

Actually there still is a minor issue with channel 4. It doesn't pass vertical calibration. A quick check didn't reveal an obvious attenuator problems so maybe some gain control setting is at it's maximum.

[alm]

Interesting, given the lack of wear on that channel. But maybe they used a BNC cable or a probe that does not have power/ID pins. Could be that one of the resistors drifted after being overloaded.

[Tony_G]

Secondly and worse: Windows98 starts acting up if I connect the drive. This may have to do with the fact that it isn't a normal floppy drive but a combination between a floppy disk and a 120MB optical drive (pretty amazing how they put all that into such a small space).

All those drivers should be in images you got from my link. Mine doesn't have the super drive but I've been thinking of adding it.

TonyG

[nctnico]

Secondly and worse: Windows98 starts acting up if I connect the drive. This may have to do with the fact that it isn't a normal floppy drive but a combination between a floppy disk and a 120MB optical drive (pretty amazing how they put all that into such a small space).

All those drivers should be in images you got from my link. Mine doesn't have the super drive but I've been thinking of adding it.

I made a typo: Windows98 starts acting up when the drive is not connected.

[Jwalling]

Secondly and worse: Windows98 starts acting up if I connect the drive. This may have to do with the fact that it isn't a normal floppy drive but a combination between a floppy disk and a 120MB optical drive (pretty amazing how they put all that into such a small space).

All those drivers should be in images you got from my link. Mine doesn't have the super drive but I've been thinking of adding it.

I made a typo: Windows98 starts acting up when the drive is not connected.

The IDE channel on those FIC motherboards is a bit flakey. It doesn't like some PATA SSD drives I've tried either. Maybe the added loading of the LS-120 compensates the bus a bit. One or more ringing signals maybe?

[Wuerstchenhund]

The IDE channel on those FIC motherboards is a bit flakey. It doesn't like some PATA SSD drives I've tried either.

The IDE controller in the buggy VIA chipset's Southbridge only supports (some buggy) UDMA-33 (UDMA-2) while most PATA SSDs require at UDMA-100/133 (UDMA-5/6). Also, if I remember correctly (and that's been a long time), only the primary IDE channel even supports UDMA (I think the secondary channel is PIO only).

Personally, I wouldn't bother with SSDs on this scope. Considering the poor performance of the VIA Apollo chipset and the limitations of the OS (Win98) I guess the best option would be an IDE-to-CF adapter. CF cards that support IDE mode usually support PIO modes which might be safer with this chipset than UDMA. Newer cards (Rev. 3 and newer) also support UDMA-33 and UDMA-66 modes (some Rev 2 cards support UDMA-33 as well). A Rev 3 card should be fast enough for this application.

A practical option would be one of the expansion cards that have a CF slot in the slot cover or a slimline CF reader so the card is accessible from outside. It would also allow to easily change between multiple copies i.e. for experimentation, or having a card for each project which contains only stored settings/screenshots/waveforms for that project. It also makes it easy to copy data to a PC.

[nctnico]

The problem with IDE CF cards is that these are typically marked as removable media. Some biosses will not boot from these and some software won't install on a removable drive. I have used exactly the same mSata to PATA adapter in my Tektronix TLA715 because of these problems. Still I agree that the motherboard and CPU are rather poor choices. BTW UDMA is disabled in the VA-503A BIOS by default and probably for a good reason.

[stj]

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/351131265761
 

[Jwalling]

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/351131265761
 

The scope uses 2.5" drives, but may be possible to use that if you want to hack in a 4 pin disk drive power cable connector, and use the secondary port. Might be easier to find a 2.5" variant.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/2-5-IDE-2-5-PATA-to-scoket-2-M-2-NGFF-SATA-SSD-adapter-card-with-case/322162290175?ssPageName=STRK%3AMEBIDX%3AIT&_trksid=p2055119.m1438.l2649

Than one does NOT work with the FIC board, though.

[nctnico]

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/351131265761
 

The scope uses 2.5" drives, but may be possible to use that if you want to hack in a 4 pin disk drive power cable connector, and use the secondary port. Might be easier to find a 2.5" variant.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/2-5-IDE-2-5-PATA-to-scoket-2-M-2-NGFF-SATA-SSD-adapter-card-with-case/322162290175?ssPageName=STRK%3AMEBIDX%3AIT&_trksid=p2055119.m1438.l2649

Than one does NOT work with the FIC board, though.

This one does:
www.ebay.com/itm/Hot-Tested-mSATA-to-2-5-PATA-IDE-Enclosure-Adapter-Case-With-Screws/201268830337

[stj]

i posted that version because it matches the motherboard headers.

if you want 2.5" then here:
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/332247062499

[Wuerstchenhund]

The problem with IDE CF cards is that these are typically marked as removable media. Some biosses will not boot from these and some software won't install on a removable drive.

Only in CF mode. Better cards support True IDE mode which means they behave as a IDE drive (fixed or removable). SanDisk (i.e Extreme), Transcend and Apacer have several cards that support True IDE mode in fixed and removable configuration, but usually only for the industrial variants, not the consumer cards.

Also, many of the cheap Chinese CF-to-IDE adapters don't put the card in True IDE mode, which is if I remember right by grounding a specific pin. Also, they don't connect the UDMA-relevant DMAACK/REQ signal pins. Nothing that can't be fixed with a soldering iron and a bit of wire.

I have used exactly the same mSata to PATA adapter in my Tektronix TLA715 because of these problems.

Never had an TLA but I've replaced IDE hard drives in a lot of similar systems (486 and up), with the right cards and a good adapter no problem.

Still I agree that the motherboard and CPU are rather poor choices. BTW UDMA is disabled in the VA-503A BIOS by default and probably for a good reason.

Probably. Which means you'd be using MWDMA which limits the board to 16MB/s (I guess a lot less with that chipset), which puts it easily into territory even an older/slower CF card could handle.

[nctnico]

Today I ran the calibration procedure (again because the calibration data from yesterday somehow got lost). According to the log it seems the attenuator for channel 4 (which used to be on channel 2 which was defective) is a little bit off for the 1x (1.024) and 5x (5.092) settings.

[Jwalling]

Today I ran the calibration procedure (again because the calibration data from yesterday somehow got lost). According to the log it seems the attenuator for channel 4 (which used to be on channel 2 which was defective) is a little bit off for the 1x (1.024) and 5x (5.092) settings.

A long-shot, but what if you config back to 54835A?

[nctnico]

I'm more inclined to swap the attenuators but the error is so small I don't think it is worth the effort. BTW this is a picture showing the input path (from the help file I found):


These are the calibration results

Code: [Select]

1)
Hf Attenuators:         Passed                                             
         0.991           4.968          10.002          50.212             

2)
Hf Attenuators:         Passed                                             
         0.996           4.988          10.009          50.148             

3)
Hf Attenuators:         Passed                                             
         0.994           4.985          10.000          50.114             

4)
Hf Attenuators:         Failed                                             
         1.014           5.092          10.000          50.000             
Channel 4 is clearly different but the error is less than 2%. Maybe channel 2 got overloaded which damaged the attenuator and destroyed the ADC hybrid.

[Jwalling]

I have an entire ACQ board (unknown status, missing all the A/D converters and has one attenuator module which is known to be bad) Do you think you could use any parts from it? You could have the attenuator module for the cost of shipping.
Some of those Teledyne relays have resistor(s) inside, maybe the one that was overloaded increased the resistance on one of them?

[nctnico]

Tempting but I think I'll leave it like it is for now. Also shipping costs may be getting close to buying a new relay if one of them turns out to be bad. I see no obvious resistive divider structures so I guess the attenuation network is inside the relay.

[TheSteve]

Yep, those are Teledyne attenuators. Far from cheap if you need replacements.

[TheSteve]

Just bought a 54845a so I can join the repair club.

[nctnico]

Just bought a 54845a so I can join the repair club.

Looking forward to read how it goes! I had a bit of a play with mine last week and it has some nice features.

[Neganur]

This one does:
www.ebay.com/itm/Hot-Tested-mSATA-to-2-5-PATA-IDE-Enclosure-Adapter-Case-With-Screws/201268830337

PS, thanks for this! You linked this already quite a while ago in another thread and I bought one together with a Kingston SSD for my E8357A.
Finally got around to clone the drive this evening and everything works as expected

[Tony_G]

Just saw this come up on an auction site and thought it might help, if the price is right of course:

http://www.go-dove.com/en/auction/view?id=12334874

No relationship with the site or seller, except that I bought pieces through the auction site before.

[TheSteve]

My 54845A arrived yesterday, picked it up and cracked it open today.
Many of the cables were disconnected - once I got them reconnected and it looked safe I powered it up. It was advertised as having no display, and that was correct, no video at all on the LCD, just a backlight. I connected an external monitor and it gets to the BIOS screen. At the same time I could hear the harddrive clunking like mad - very much dead. I found another 20 gig HD and connected it up. The scope had the original pouch on top and inside was the original floptical recovery media. I removed the floptical drive cleaned it and reinstalled. The disks are from 1999 but so far are still working. Recovery is in progress.

Updates as they happen.

edit - only had a PS2 keyboard so I made an adapter using an 8 PIN din with pins removed and a PS2 socket. Got to 25% recovery and the floptical drive doesn't sound very healthy but is still going.

edit2 - The sucker has an American Megatrends Atlas PCI-III motherboard, a K6-2-/300 CPU and a whopping 64 megs of ram!

edit3 - recovery succeeded and self tests pass. The HD was making too much noise though so I dug out a couple IDE 2.5 inch flash drives, one of them seems to work fine so I am recovering to it.

Once I determine how much is working I will be pulling the front off to have a look at the LCD.

[TheSteve]

Well this is encouraging:

[TheSteve]

Pulled the entire front off the scope. There was a place to push the autoprobe front panel off but the location doesn't match any pictures posted in this thread or the service manual.
After getting the front off I determined the ribbon cable wasn't even plugged into the LCD panel. There were also many missing screws. I reconnected the LCD and am very pleased to see it come to life.
Now I bought this as a parts unit with no display, no other info was known other then it "appeared complete". Several of the case screws were missing in the picture. It was obviously taken apart for some reason and it looks like someone shoved it back together in hurry being so much was disconnected internally.

So far many screws and one of the BNC locking nuts is also missing from the front. I did notice some of the vertical encoders do miss/jump steps - maybe that was the original fault someone was planning to work on and not the LCD panel itself? They are all covered in heavy dust and likely need a good cleaning.

I do see a little pulsing/flicker on the LCD panel as it is warming up - maybe it will get worse, or there is a power supply issue.

[tautech]

I do see a little pulsing/flicker on the LCD panel as it is warming up - maybe it will get worse, or there is a power supply issue.

On the screen info or the backlight ?

[Tony_G]

Nice, glad to hear it seems to basically work.

As an aside, I've wondered how HP expected you to clip the probe ground to gnd socket for compensation. Seems really easy for it to pop off.

[TheSteve]

Well no flicker recently, may have been a bad connection to one of the backlite tubes. I have reassembled the unit for now and given it a quick cleaning. There is one screw barely holding the front controls in. I will have to order some longer screws.
Most of the encoders are behaving now but one or two need further cleaning. I tried out a 1152A 2.5 GHz active probe and it calibrates fine on each channel. I will have to find a way to upgrade the software - this MB has no USB. And I don't have any spare magneto optical media floating around. It was nice to find the original Win98 license and restore media in the top pouch - that has gotta be quite uncommon.

I am trying out 8 GS/s mode, here is a 1.5 GHz 1 Vpp signal. If I go higher in frequency the attenuation isn't too bad but before 1.6 GHz triggering stops.

edit - took a while but I finally found the proper length M3x0.5 26mm screws in my collection (20 year old radio control parts). Also found some screws to use on the case so the scope is no longer missing any screws. The rotary encoders were also cleaned a second time and seem pretty good now.

[nctnico]

Dang! I wish I bought that one! I guess the previous owner didn't had any knowledge about PCs and started pulling cables.
Does it also pass it's self calibration?

[TheSteve]

Dang! I wish I bought that one! I guess the previous owner didn't had any knowledge about PCs and started pulling cables.
Does it also pass it's self calibration?

Yes, self test and self calibration both pass. So far I am very impressed, I have less then $290 USD into it including the shipping.
Guess I can't complain too much that it only had 3 feet. For the moment it has the two front feet installed.

Amazing how much hardware is in it compared to my MSOX3000T series scope...

[nctnico]

Dang! I wish I bought that one! I guess the previous owner didn't had any knowledge about PCs and started pulling cables.
Does it also pass it's self calibration?

Yes, self test and self calibration both pass. So far I am very impressed, I have less then $290 USD into it including the shipping.

Oh, yes please RUB IT IN! 

[TheSteve]

Here are a couple shots showing SWR (return loss) of the input. I don't know if this would change at all if the scope was rejumpered to a 54846A etc. It is interested to note it uses 4 different ranges, the MSOX3000 series uses only two.

20mV/div
50mV/div
200mV/div
500mV/div

[TheSteve]

Decided I should try upgrading from version 3.50 today.
As nctnico has already mentioned the built in upgrade tool only wants to read from the Magneto Optical drive. He used a hex editor to change the path so he could read the upgrade files from a USB drive. My scope has no USB ports so I tried something else.
I unpacked the 4_3_upg upgrade package on my desktop and copied the files directly to the scopes hard drive. I then booted the scope, killed the scope app and used explorer to copy the files to c:\scope\upgrade\scope\temp\
Once the files are copied you can run HP548UPG.exe directly from that directory and it will perform the upgrade.
With version 4.3 running I removed all of the files from the upgrade directory and repeated the process with the 4.5 update.
It was a pretty hassle free way to upgrade the scope. Going from version 3.5 to 4.3 easily doubles the boot time of the scope(3.5 direct to 4.5 might not as it will skip the web features). I suppose that is the tradeoff for adding the built in webserver with webcontrol. If nothing else it makes it easy to grab screen shots.

[Jwalling]

This just showed up if you're interested nctnico.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Agilent-HP-Keysight-54845-66502-Attenuator-for-54845A-54845B-54835A-T7-B17-/182713390428?epid=12003971610&hash=item2a8a91155c:g:a3AAAOSw8VJZjg9C

Not cheap, but there's a BO.

[nctnico]

This just showed up if you're interested nctnico.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Agilent-HP-Keysight-54845-66502-Attenuator-for-54845A-54845B-54835A-T7-B17-/182713390428?epid=12003971610&hash=item2a8a91155c:g:a3AAAOSw8VJZjg9C

Interesting but I think a new relay may be cheaper and there is also the question whether the relays aren't worn on an attenuator from Ebay.

[eurofox]

I joint the club, just won a dead 54845A, nice cosmetic with install disk, manuals, original keyboard and mouse.

[Tony_G]

I joint the club, just won a dead 54845A, nice cosmetic with install disk, manuals, original keyboard and mouse.

Nice - Look forward to seeing the photos and the story of bringing it back to life.

[JanNousiainen]

Yay, I will join the club too

Just got a broken 54845A from my employer for free. It was working well and was even calibrated recently but then all channels started to show signal being over the vertical range and there was three FAIL's on self test and on that point the scope program just crashed. Original mouse, keyboard and mouse mat follows the scope.

Symptoms sounds pretty similar as in here:

http://www.dasarodesigns.com/projects/fixing-an-hp-agilent-54845a-infinium-oscilloscope/

With a bit of luck this could actually be fixed and then I have pretty impressive scope compared to what I have now

[Tony_G]

Yay, I will join the club too

Just got a broken 54845A from my employer for free.

Good luck with it - If you need it I have the software hosted further up in the thread I think. If you can't find the link let me know and I'll repost.

TonyG

[JanNousiainen]

Had time to snap few photos:

20935000_10155501727973463_374710227212071001_o by Jan Nousiainen, on Flickr

21014096_10155501726808463_3357537562277012915_o by Jan Nousiainen, on Flickr

21014043_10155501734243463_7132642189203810817_o by Jan Nousiainen, on Flickr

20988433_10155501729338463_4532608220713741416_o by Jan Nousiainen, on Flickr

K6-200 CPU, 16 MB of RAM, 1,3 GB HDD and Windows 95... You cannot get lower specs even if you tried I think

Most obvious things to upgrade, RAM and CPU? Will this unit run Windows 98 straight away?

[Zucca]

JanNousiainen never turn it on, without taking it apart first. 

Looks like you have some adventure in front of you with that scope, please keep us posted.

[nctnico]

I'd fix/diagnose the problems first and then start thinking about upgrading.
I think you have an older model so you have to investigate what kind of processor and memory the motherboard will work with.

[Tony_G]

Just adding this here in case it's useful to you:

you can launch scope.exe using the service command  " scope.exe /service" that gives extra options in the self test menu where you can set attenuator click and othe roptions

Also you should be able to use the link to the scope software to upgrade to Win98 - I'm not sure what the experience will be like but I'd check the PDF that describes the process and limitations first.

TonyG

[eurofox]

My scope on the way to my home, should be here in about 2 weeks.

[JanNousiainen]

Ran the scope app with /service option and got boatload of new fails, too many to mention. Opened the case to have a quick look inside but saw nothing obvious.

Well, atleast the external display works

IMG_20170823_220033 by Jan Nousiainen, on Flickr

Info screen:

IMG_20170823_220134 by Jan Nousiainen, on Flickr

AMI Atlas III motherboard, propably oldest used in Infiniums?

IMG_20170823_225438 by Jan Nousiainen, on Flickr

Trying to make room on my desk to start proper inspection, supply voltages and bypassing attenuators by feeding signal straight to hybrids etc.

What needs to be removed to get the attenuator modules out?

[JanNousiainen]

Still cleaning desk (and installing more sockets to lab etc) to be able to start proper debugging 

Being overly optimistic, ordered some 64 MB of RAM in addition of current 16 MB to allow Windows 98 to run which is required to run later SW. Where can I find the update images/files? I think I need IDE CD-ROM too?

[Tony_G]

In case you need it I saved a copy of the software folders from the Keysight FTP Server (they went missing last time I checked there)

https://1drv.ms/f/s!Amqar8_XQ9Uzj6YhN1xHdM8tQdKMOA

TonyG

I used a parallel port CD-ROM drive I bought from eBay ("MicroSolutions Backpack Parallel Port CD-ROM Drive", I paid $14 for it but I took a quick look and they seem to be much more expensive now). Apparently you can hook up an IDE CD ROM drive on the secondary IDE channel though so I'd try that path, especially if you have one laying around already.

TonyG

[JanNousiainen]

Holy freaking crap! 

I followed through this article and did some measurements: http://www.dasarodesigns.com/projects/fixing-an-hp-agilent-54845a-infinium-oscilloscope/

And guess what? In my scope the -3.1V supply shows +0.8V, same as in his scope! So it is probably failed opamp in my scope too!  Could it really be so simple?

Going to order few LT2726 IC's ASAP...

[JanNousiainen]

In case you need it I saved a copy of the software folders from the Keysight FTP Server (they went missing last time I checked there)

https://1drv.ms/f/s!Amqar8_XQ9Uzj6YhN1xHdM8tQdKMOA

TonyG

I used a parallel port CD-ROM drive I bought from eBay ("MicroSolutions Backpack Parallel Port CD-ROM Drive", I paid $14 for it but I took a quick look and they seem to be much more expensive now). Apparently you can hook up an IDE CD ROM drive on the secondary IDE channel though so I'd try that path, especially if you have one laying around already.

TonyG

Thank you for the link I think I will try the IDE CD-ROM first, could be easier and faster to source one of those. Or, I do have few already but they are in different country than me...

[JanNousiainen]

Now a stupid Infinium noob question 

Do the upgrades only contain the scope SW and not OS? Looking at the upgrade file sizes that might be the case? I have not yet upgraded SW so I don't know.

If updates only contain scope SW and it is OS independent, can I just install Windows XP to my scope (now Windows 95) and then install upgrade on that? Provided that my ancient HW is able to run XP that is.

[TheSteve]

The upgrades I have used are scope applications only. Based on what I've read I'd stick with Win98.

[nctnico]

I tried to install XP but the problem is that the drivers for the acquisition card are not available. The Windows98 drivers won't work on XP because XP is completely different when it comes to drivers.

[Zucca]

same old story, only bad SW can stop good HW EE

[Howardlong]

I tried to install XP but the problem is that the drivers for the acquisition card are not available. The Windows98 drivers won't work on XP because XP is completely different when it comes to drivers.

Do you know what the VIDs/PIDs are for the acq card? Maybe in the range 15BC:0500 to 15BC:0507?

[Tony_G]

The full software should be in there - Drill into the 54845A folder and you'll see a bunch of folders marked XX_recovery - Those should have the full OS versions in them - I'm not sure how it works out what the OS to install is but the file sizes are right for that.

My Scope was Win98 and I started from the 3_5_recovery image and then did the 4_x updates.

TonyG

[eurofox]

I should get mine tomorrow, I will post my repair progress here if ntcnico don’t mind that we pollute he’s post but I think it is a good idea to keep the repair of the same instrument in one post. 

[nctnico]

No objections from me. It's Dave's forum anyway 
Looking forward to what you find!

[JanNousiainen]

Holy freaking crap! 

I followed through this article and did some measurements: http://www.dasarodesigns.com/projects/fixing-an-hp-agilent-54845a-infinium-oscilloscope/

And guess what? In my scope the -3.1V supply shows +0.8V, same as in his scope! So it is probably failed opamp in my scope too!  Could it really be so simple?

Going to order few LT2726 IC's ASAP...

Hmmmmm, also +0.85V regulator output looks funny, Vout is 3.9V. Perhaps good idea to replace that one too, type is LT1086CM. Not sure what the ADJ pin should be at, mine is about +2.5V.

[eurofox]

I got finally my scope today. 

Very big surprise when power up, start …. Boot ….. no error …. Pass al tests. 

It was sold “as is” with no warranty, was sold by someone who know nothing about instruments and buy from closing business …. 

I got one brand new probe with it. Got the original installations disks still sealed.   

After cleaning up it is in a near mint condition, only minor problem I have to replace the legs but this is not a problem. 

[nctnico]

@eurofox:  Great find sometimes people can get lucky!

[Tony_G]

I've always wondered how HPAK expected the probe ground to connect to the grounding plug given that they have alligator clips on the probes and a socket for the ground....

Anyway, glad to see you scored there - Hopefully Jan does the OpAmp swap and it starts working too.

TonyG

[Jwalling]

I got finally my scope today. 

Very big surprise when power up, start …. Boot ….. no error …. Pass al tests. 

Does it pass the calibration as well?

[TheSteve]

I've always wondered how HPAK expected the probe ground to connect to the grounding plug given that they have alligator clips on the probes and a socket for the ground....

Anyway, glad to see you scored there - Hopefully Jan does the OpAmp swap and it starts working too.

TonyG

The probe ground is actually very easy to clip too. It isn't a regular banana socket.

[Jwalling]

I've always wondered how HPAK expected the probe ground to connect to the grounding plug given that they have alligator clips on the probes and a socket for the ground....

Anyway, glad to see you scored there - Hopefully Jan does the OpAmp swap and it starts working too.

TonyG

The probe ground is actually very easy to clip too. It isn't a regular banana socket.

And you can always clip it to the AUX out BNC shell anyway...

[Howardlong]

A quick glance of the service manual suggests that the attenuators are a different part number for the 54846a. Are there any thoughts on the hackability up to this version? There was some mention of an extra resistor, R4, somewhere on the acquisition board, but I fear there may be more to it.

[eurofox]

I got finally my scope today. 

Very big surprise when power up, start …. Boot ….. no error …. Pass al tests. 

Does it pass the calibration as well?

Yep, just finish it. 

[Tony_G]

The probe ground is actually very easy to clip too. It isn't a regular banana socket.

Hmm, my clips always seem to slip off at the slightest movement. I'll have to take a close look at the socket.

TonyG

[eurofox]

And now the 2 cent question 

How can options be enabled on infinium scopes? 

If I look to what this guy did, he enabled all available options.

All Enabled Options.
64MPts, EZJIT Plus, High Speed Serial, Low Speed Serial, Force 1G, User Def Fn, eGUI, Voice, Power, PRMLpro, PRMLpro 2, PMRLpro 3, PRMLpro 4, PRMLpro 5, App Remote, Gigabit Ethernet, DVI, HDMI, USB, Wireless USB, USB3 Compliance, Xilinx Probe, Altera Probe, Fibre Channel, CAN, FB DIMM, Express Card, SATA 1, SATA 2, SATA 6 Upgrade, SAS, DDR1, DDR2, DDR3, GDDR, GDDR3, GDDR4, GDDR5, MIPI, Display Port, FlexRay, My Compliance, AP3, AP4, AP5. Some options are officially not supported for this scope model.

http://www.ebay.pl/itm/Agilent-54831D-MSO-4an-16dig-wUpgraded-Motherboard-cpu-2-3-2GHz-RAM-SSD-ALL-OPTS/291821246325

[Howardlong]

And now the 2 cent question 

How can options be enabled on infinium scopes? 

If I look to what this guy did, he enabled all available options.

All Enabled Options.
64MPts, EZJIT Plus, High Speed Serial, Low Speed Serial, Force 1G, User Def Fn, eGUI, Voice, Power, PRMLpro, PRMLpro 2, PMRLpro 3, PRMLpro 4, PRMLpro 5, App Remote, Gigabit Ethernet, DVI, HDMI, USB, Wireless USB, USB3 Compliance, Xilinx Probe, Altera Probe, Fibre Channel, CAN, FB DIMM, Express Card, SATA 1, SATA 2, SATA 6 Upgrade, SAS, DDR1, DDR2, DDR3, GDDR, GDDR3, GDDR4, GDDR5, MIPI, Display Port, FlexRay, My Compliance, AP3, AP4, AP5. Some options are officially not supported for this scope model.

http://www.ebay.pl/itm/Agilent-54831D-MSO-4an-16dig-wUpgraded-Motherboard-cpu-2-3-2GHz-RAM-SSD-ALL-OPTS/291821246325

A lot of those options don't work with the 54831D.

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/agilent-54831d-modernising/msg1144527/#msg1144527 and you add the optioms you want to the licence file. Of course that hack only works with 5.71 software, I am not sure that version works with the 54835/45/46?

[JanNousiainen]

Got 64 MB of RAM yesterday, installed and seemed to work. Today I should have the replacement op amps in my hands. Also ordered regulator for 0.85V rail. Looking for 2.5" IDE HDD to install Win 98 (do not feel like installing on original HDD) and newer software. Also IDE CD-ROM drive is needed.

Is there RS232/SPI/I2C serial decode option for early Infiniums? Or any other options apart from USB testing voice control? All the literature I have seen has been pretty thin on that respect.

[eurofox]

Got 64 MB of RAM yesterday, installed and seemed to work. Today I should have the replacement op amps in my hands. Also ordered regulator for 0.85V rail. Looking for 2.5" IDE HDD to install Win 98 (do not feel like installing on original HDD) and newer software. Also IDE CD-ROM drive is needed.

Is there RS232/SPI/I2C serial decode option for early Infiniums? Or any other options apart from USB testing voice control? All the literature I have seen has been pretty thin on that respect.

I'm not sure that the extra RAM will speed up the oscilloscope software, it seems that limited OS resources are used by the oscilloscope software, on my scope it is very responsive.

I hope that the new IC will solve your problem.

I think power analysis software was available as well but you are right, there is limited information available about the options.

[JanNousiainen]

I'm not sure that the extra RAM will speed up the oscilloscope software, it seems that limited OS resources are used by the oscilloscope software, on my scope it is very responsive.

I hope that the new IC will solve your problem.

I had only 16 MB to start with, that is enough for Windows 95 my unit has but not enough for Windows 98 that is required by last applicable scope SW I believe. So I had to get bit more. There is VRM (voltage regulation module) on motherboard, if I could find a way to drop it's output voltage  from 2.9 V to around 2.2 V I could fit much faster processor. Not that it would make much difference to scope performance I guess

[nctnico]

I did measure an increase in waveforms/s with a faster processor. If you install a lot of memory (which costs peanuts anyway) you can disable swap which will also make Windows work faster.

[eurofox]

I'm not sure that the extra RAM will speed up the oscilloscope software, it seems that limited OS resources are used by the oscilloscope software, on my scope it is very responsive.

I hope that the new IC will solve your problem.

 I could find a way to drop it's output voltage  from 2.9 V to around 2.2 V I could fit much faster processor. Not that it would make much difference to scope performance I guess

A diode will do the job 

[nctnico]

A diode won't work because it's forward voltage depends a lot on the current. Even a Schottky diode will drop close to 1V at higher currents.

[markb82]

A diode won't work because it's forward voltage depends a lot on the current. Even a Schottky diode will drop close to 1V at higher currents.

How about an NPN diode connected (collector to base), which should give you 0.6V even at high currents (within reason).

[JanNousiainen]

OMG 

IMG_20170907_222730 by Jan Nousiainen, on Flickr

IMG_20170907_222745 by Jan Nousiainen, on Flickr

IMG_20170907_225718 by Jan Nousiainen, on Flickr

It fukken works! I got 1.5 GHz 8 GS/s scope for price of 4€ opamp  Now I can justify spending bit money to get second IDE HDD and CD-ROM for upgrade to Windows 98.

[nctnico]

Can somebody lock this thread?  Everyone seems to get these scopes cheaper and with far less serious problems than mine  I cannot stand it! 

[TheSteve]

Does calibration pass?

[eurofox]

Really glad that you could fix it 
And now a calibration run 

[Tony_G]

Nice - It seems that this is the month for these things to become available - There were a few on the auction sites I frequent.

TonyG

[eurofox]

Question about updating the software:

The actual version is 3.7

I manage to move 3.73 (10 floppy disk), 4.3 (3 files) and 4.5 (3 files) by using the network to drive C: in a directory “update”.

Since I don’t want to brick my scope and in all documentation only floppy or CDROM options are discussed.
From the utility menu the upgrade function only work with the floppy, trying to run the exe file (with windows Explorer) start the scope software existing software …. Strange.

Is it really needed to use a CDROM to update the software? 

It all depend of the installation procedure build in the exe update file.

[nctnico]

A few posts back someone described how to upgrade without disk/CDROM. You need to unpack the files to a specific directory and restart the oscilloscope.

[eurofox]

A few posts back someone described how to upgrade without disk/CDROM. You need to unpack the files to a specific directory and restart the oscilloscope.

Thank you for drawing my attention to this post, I missed this one. 

I did something similar from another directory and it was not working. 

By following the procedure it worked like a charm, the directory “update” was hidden. 

After the 4.3 USB analyse was enabled and disappear after installation of 4.5. 

[eurofox]

Is there RS232/SPI/I2C serial decode option for early Infiniums? Or any other options apart from USB testing voice control? All the literature I have seen has been pretty thin on that respect.

Here is the list 

http://www.keysight.com/en/pd-1143488-pn-N5445A/infiniium-application-server-license-for-infiniium-oscilloscopes?pm=OP&nid=-32976.685330&cc=GB&lc=eng

[Jwalling]

Is there RS232/SPI/I2C serial decode option for early Infiniums? Or any other options apart from USB testing voice control? All the literature I have seen has been pretty thin on that respect.

Here is the list 

http://www.keysight.com/en/pd-1143488-pn-N5445A/infiniium-application-server-license-for-infiniium-oscilloscopes?pm=OP&nid=-32976.685330&cc=GB&lc=eng

Pretty sure none of those work on the first generation Infiniiums.
"User must have Infiniium firmware revision A.05.30 or later"

That version number FW is for the 54830B/D series or later.

EDIT: In fact, other than voice control, the only SW options I know of are are runt triggering (standard on the 54835A and 54845A) and communication masks.

Has anybody ever played with voice control? I've never seen that in action...

[eurofox]

My scope is now 100% OK and update to the latest version. 

Now the probe problem, I have 1 new 1161A supplied with the scope, maybe I’ll try to get another one on a “decent” price but need to come from Europe since shipping and duty make it not affordable in comparison to the investment of the scope. 

I will maybe buy 2 or 4 200mhz probes from Hantek, they are not expensive. 

Now why having a 1.5ghz scope and not having the appropriate probes? 

They are too expensive, 500-800€ and more + shipping cost + duty’s for 1 probe! 

Why not build one like this one : https://elektrotanya.com/files/forum/2009/10/e04a036.pdf 

But put it in an aluminium tube or buy one like this one : http://www.benl.ebay.be/itm/RF-Active-Probe-0-1-1500-MHz-1-5-GHz-analyzer-oscilloscope/332253695460?ssPageName=STRK%3AMEBIDX%3AIT&_trksid=p2055119.m1438.l2649

It should be possible to get power from the autoprobe, I could manage to build a BNC connector with a pin to get the right voltage needed for this kind of probe. 

Anybody experience in this area?

[lukier]

Why not build one like this one : https://elektrotanya.com/files/forum/2009/10/e04a036.pdf 

But put it in an aluminium tube or buy one like this one : http://www.benl.ebay.be/itm/RF-Active-Probe-0-1-1500-MHz-1-5-GHz-analyzer-oscilloscope/332253695460?ssPageName=STRK%3AMEBIDX%3AIT&_trksid=p2055119.m1438.l2649

I remember reading threads here about these probes, even wanted to DIY something, but then I scored multiple (single/diff) LeCroy active probes for a decent price. What stuck to me is that all these DIY designs are "RF" probes and AC coupled (no DC) and I wondered if this could be a problem.

[Howardlong]

My scope is now 100% OK and update to the latest version. 

Now the probe problem, I have 1 new 1161A supplied with the scope, maybe I’ll try to get another one on a “decent” price but need to come from Europe since shipping and duty make it not affordable in comparison to the investment of the scope. 

I will maybe buy 2 or 4 200mhz probes from Hantek, they are not expensive. 

Now why having a 1.5ghz scope and not having the appropriate probes? 

They are too expensive, 500-800€ and more + shipping cost + duty’s for 1 probe! 

Why not build one like this one : https://elektrotanya.com/files/forum/2009/10/e04a036.pdf 

But put it in an aluminium tube or buy one like this one : http://www.benl.ebay.be/itm/RF-Active-Probe-0-1-1500-MHz-1-5-GHz-analyzer-oscilloscope/332253695460?ssPageName=STRK%3AMEBIDX%3AIT&_trksid=p2055119.m1438.l2649

It should be possible to get power from the autoprobe, I could manage to build a BNC connector with a pin to get the right voltage needed for this kind of probe. 

Anybody experience in this area?

The 1152A 2.5GHz 100k ohm 0.6pF FET probe is frequently available for a reasonable price, but just make sure it comes with a good set of the accessory parts, particularly the walking stick ground seems to go amiss. You can survive without it by jury rigging your solution but it's not best solution.

Also the 54006a 10:1 & 20:1 (500 and 1k ohm) 0.25pF 6GHz resistive passive probe, again make sure it comes with accessories including the walking stick probe assemblies, spare resistors, AC coupler, SMA cable and the SMA-BNC adapter.

Plus...
N2874A 10:1 1.5GHz resistive (500 ohm) 2pF passive probe.
N2876A 100:1 1.5GHz resistive (5k ohm) 2.5pF passive probe.

[nctnico]

I tried to install XP but the problem is that the drivers for the acquisition card are not available. The Windows98 drivers won't work on XP because XP is completely different when it comes to drivers.

Do you know what the VIDs/PIDs are for the acq card? Maybe in the range 15BC:0500 to 15BC:0507?

No, according to the list from the BIOS I think it is 103C:1020 (that is the only unknown PCI device listed)

[JanNousiainen]

Welp, mine is out of commission again I tried to update SW from HDD but setup quit before end because I had IE3, not IE4... Now scope loader just freezes.

I guess I will be getting few IDE HDD's and CD-ROM and start from scratch.

Managed to get Win 95 and Win 7 machines to see eachother in network but could not log in to shares from either one. So I set up a http server in Win7 and downloaded update SW to scope that way.

[Neganur]

You should be able to just hook the HDD to your win7 machine and access the files directly.

[JanNousiainen]

You should be able to just hook the HDD to your win7 machine and access the files directly.

None of the machines I have at hand have IDE bus, only SATA. I do have older machines with IDE but they are about 1000 km away...

USB to IDE adapter would work. I have one of those but you guessed it, it is also somewhere else. I'll check if I can get cheap one locally.

[eurofox]

You should be able to just hook the HDD to your win7 machine and access the files directly.

None of the machines I have at hand have IDE bus, only SATA. I do have older machines with IDE but they are about 1000 km away...

USB to IDE adapter would work. I have one of those but you guessed it, it is also somewhere else. I'll check if I can get cheap one locally.

I have since several years a device that connect USB to all common hard disk technology, ATA, SATA, IDE ….
I don’t remember the price I pay for it but it was quite cheap.



I’m surprised that you got problems to transfer the updates over the network.
I reinstall de driver for network card, enable Microsoft client with TCPIP and allow disk sharing without password.
On my Windows 10 notebook I make “discovery of network” active, the scope was discovered and provide access to the hard disk of the scope and this ways I could transfer the update files.

[eurofox]

My scope is now 100% OK and update to the latest version. 

Now the probe problem, I have 1 new 1161A supplied with the scope, maybe I’ll try to get another one on a “decent” price but need to come from Europe since shipping and duty make it not affordable in comparison to the investment of the scope. 

I will maybe buy 2 or 4 200mhz probes from Hantek, they are not expensive. 

Now why having a 1.5ghz scope and not having the appropriate probes? 

They are too expensive, 500-800€ and more + shipping cost + duty’s for 1 probe! 

Why not build one like this one : https://elektrotanya.com/files/forum/2009/10/e04a036.pdf 

But put it in an aluminium tube or buy one like this one : http://www.benl.ebay.be/itm/RF-Active-Probe-0-1-1500-MHz-1-5-GHz-analyzer-oscilloscope/332253695460?ssPageName=STRK%3AMEBIDX%3AIT&_trksid=p2055119.m1438.l2649

It should be possible to get power from the autoprobe, I could manage to build a BNC connector with a pin to get the right voltage needed for this kind of probe. 

Anybody experience in this area?

The 1152A 2.5GHz 100k ohm 0.6pF FET probe is frequently available for a reasonable price, but just make sure it comes with a good set of the accessory parts, particularly the walking stick ground seems to go amiss. You can survive without it by jury rigging your solution but it's not best solution.

Also the 54006a 10:1 & 20:1 (500 and 1k ohm) 0.25pF 6GHz resistive passive probe, again make sure it comes with accessories including the walking stick probe assemblies, spare resistors, AC coupler, SMA cable and the SMA-BNC adapter.

Plus...
N2874A 10:1 1.5GHz resistive (500 ohm) 2pF passive probe.
N2876A 100:1 1.5GHz resistive (5k ohm) 2.5pF passive probe.

The 1152A with accessories go for more than what I pay for the not working scope.

On the top of that they are usually available on the US market, this mean a lot of shipping cost and import duties.

This is the classical problem when you buy a second and high bandwidth scope, the probes cost are equal or superior of the scope itself because on the second hand market, a working probe is sold from 25% to 50% of the a new one, the scope is from 5% (not working) to 25% for a working one.

[JanNousiainen]

Bought USB -> IDE / SATA adapter with power supply for drive and 2 x 40 GB IDE HDD for 25€, now I have to wait for them to arrive from china...

[Someone]

The 1152A with accessories go for more than what I pay for the not working scope.

On the top of that they are usually available on the US market, this mean a lot of shipping cost and import duties.

This is the classical problem when you buy a second and high bandwidth scope, the probes cost are equal or superior of the scope itself because on the second hand market, a working probe is sold from 25% to 50% of the a new one, the scope is from 5% (not working) to 25% for a working one.

Even for a new scope its normal to spend equal to or more than the purchase price on probes. If you're stuck with your mindset of cheap broken scopes for repairs then you should buy broken probes and repair them to go with it.

[eurofox]

I wake up this thread with respect to USB on the scope.

According the experience of ntcnico, it seems that removing the floppy create some problem, it is a pity because usb floppy slim emulator are available and they are cheap. 

Other solution since I think there is one PCI slot free on the motherboard is installing a PCI USB adapter with support for Win98, they are available on ebay second hand for a few €.

I just checked the rise time from my Infiniium scope, 232ps, this confirm the 1.5GHz bandwidth. 

[eurofox]

Update on my scope:
USB: My motherboard support 2 USB connections on the motherboard.

I bought this unit: http://electromyne.de/Server-Parts-Supermicro-FPUSB813-Server-Front-Panel-2x-USB-Serial-COM-RS232-Silver-Silber.html
Fit perfectly in the place of the original floppy, com port as well on the front.
It is plug & play and no need to pray, cables, screws all fit perfectly, com2 is now connected to the front panel. 

Manage in the bios to disable the floppy and work without problem with the floppy removed. 

I added as well memory, very cheap from the same shop and was shipped in 2 days door to door from Germany. 

Got the exact colour to repair the little scratches and blemish, now my scope is in a real mint condition.

Install a pdf printer emulator. 

Now hunting for probes. 

[Tony_G]

I added as well memory, very cheap from the same shop and was shipped in 2 days door to door from Germany. 

What was the real impact of adding the memory? Was it just faster operation due to less swap file access or did it make the actual scope memory depth better?

TonyG

[Jwalling]

I bought this unit: http://electromyne.de/Server-Parts-Supermicro-FPUSB813-Server-Front-Panel-2x-USB-Serial-COM-RS232-Silver-Silber.html
Fit perfectly in the place of the original floppy, com port as well on the front.
It is plug & play and no need to pray, cables, screws all fit perfectly, com2 is now connected to the front panel. 

Got the exact colour to repair the little scratches and blemish, now my scope is in a real mint condition.

I think that you should paint the USB/COM port the same color as the front panel since you have the paint.

EDIT: PS, nice job though! 

[eurofox]

I added as well memory, very cheap from the same shop and was shipped in 2 days door to door from Germany. 

What was the real impact of adding the memory? Was it just faster operation due to less swap file access or did it make the actual scope memory depth better?

TonyG

On the Infiniium software I don't see any improvement, when using Win98 explorer or other programs it is more reactiv.
 

[Zucca]

Manage in the bios to disable the floppy and work without problem with the floppy removed. 

Is tha an user option in the BIOS or an hack? Can you provide more details?

[eurofox]

Manage in the bios to disable the floppy and work without problem with the floppy removed. 

Is tha an user option in the BIOS or an hack? Can you provide more details?

It is just tricking the setting, not really an hack but not really a setting 

[JanNousiainen]

Ok, made a new clean HDD and installed Windows 98 First Edition to it. Started installing 4.5 scope software to it but after creating RAM drive and rebooting nothing further happens, running the installer gives empty error message dialog. Same with 4.3. Installer packages that I have only contain three files, executable and two other files.

Should I install Win95 instead? That is what the scope came with but it had older scope SW version, started with 3.

[nctnico]

Did you also install the driver for the acquisition board? How do the PCI settings look?

[Tony_G]

I go through the process of installing the software in this video:

https://youtu.be/L49qug1oGuo?t=5m9s

You can get all the files here:

https://1drv.ms/f/s!Amqar8_XQ9Uzj6YhN1xHdM8tQdKMOA

Read the PDF and start with the recovery image. FYI This process requires the use of a CDROM drive, TheSteve published a way around that:

Decided I should try upgrading from version 3.50 today.
As nctnico has already mentioned the built in upgrade tool only wants to read from the Magneto Optical drive. He used a hex editor to change the path so he could read the upgrade files from a USB drive. My scope has no USB ports so I tried something else.
I unpacked the 4_3_upg upgrade package on my desktop and copied the files directly to the scopes hard drive. I then booted the scope, killed the scope app and used explorer to copy the files to c:\scope\upgrade\scope\temp\
Once the files are copied you can run HP548UPG.exe directly from that directory and it will perform the upgrade.
With version 4.3 running I removed all of the files from the upgrade directory and repeated the process with the 4.5 update.
It was a pretty hassle free way to upgrade the scope. Going from version 3.5 to 4.3 easily doubles the boot time of the scope(3.5 direct to 4.5 might not as it will skip the web features). I suppose that is the tradeoff for adding the built in webserver with webcontrol. If nothing else it makes it easy to grab screen shots.

TonyG

[Tony_G]

Any update? Just wondering how it turned out.

[Jwalling]

Back to the uphacking part. I located several resistors and decided to attach some switches after a few futile attempts to change the resistors using SMT tweezers.



The scope software can be stopped using ctrl-alt-del which opens up the task manager on Win98 and restarted from the menu so testing all the combinations could be done quickly.

Code: [Select]

R3 R2 R1 R0
-  -  X  X  54835A
X  X  -  -  54845A

X = placed, - = open

I have not found the 54846A mode but I have not included R4 in my test because I didn't spot it when looking for potential candidates. For now I'm fine with the 54845A mode.

According to the notes I have (and I think I PM'd them to you), there are only two resistors used for strapping. Was I incorrect?

(note that my crappy drawing doesn't show that R1 is also 0 Ohms.)

I have a 54846A on my bench that I'm repairing at the moment (bulging caps on the motherboard). When I get it up and running, I'll pull the ACQ board and verify the config.

When I had the motherboard pulled, I noticed that the date code on the sheet metal under the MB was dated 2001, yet the serial prefix is MY40. How can this be?   I would have thought that the sheet metal should have been older, or the serial # newer...

[Jwalling]

Here's the 54846A. Just two resistors need to be de-populated, so my drawing is at least correct for the 54846A.

[nctnico]

I must say I tested my scope with software version 3.x so maybe that version doesn't support the 54846A  But it is good to know which strapping I need alter in order to unleash more bandwidth 

[Jwalling]

I must say I tested my scope with software version 3.x so maybe that version doesn't support the 54846A  But it is good to know which strapping I need alter in order to unleash more bandwidth 

I'm not sure about that one...

Now that I'm playing with one of these again, I remember one thing I really dislike about them. They won't trigger for shit at anywhere near their rated bandwidth with a sine wave applied. This one craps out at about 1.3GHz, and I'm combining CH1 CH2 for 8GS/s. There was an excuse explanation by an Agilent Keysight support engineer (I think it was Algoss) that I bookmarked, but I guess the link didn't survive a change in their forum. Or maybe they trash the old stuff.
It was here: http://www.keysight.com/owc_discussions/thread.jspa?messageID=118580&#118580

Should have saved it locally

[Jwalling]

And then I find it.
https://community.keysight.com/message/69764

I'll put it here in case it moves again. Hope I don't mess this up...

Keywords: 54835A 54845A 54846A Understanding trigger specifications.

QUESTION:

Understanding trigger specifications
Question asked by deninnh on Jan 22, 2015
Latest reply on Jan 23, 2015 by deninnh

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I've been using scopes for over 30 years up to the latest and thought I knew them fairly well.  I've purchased several high end scopes in the past and have to admit that trigger specifications were not high on my list of concerns.  They just worked !

After acquiring a personal 54846A which will not trigger above 1GHz on a clean sine wave (Agilent source), I decided I should read the spec.

It was surprising to find that trigger sensitivity for this 2.25GHz scope is only spec'd up to 1GHz.

So then what happens ?

Funny thing is that it *will* trigger on very fast events like an avalanche pulser or airborne ESD event (from a distance of course) with risetimes below 200ps.  But it just can't handle a sine wave.  I've looked at the source output and it is very clean spectrally.  On another 3GHz scope, the sine wave is perfect.

Is the scope broken?  All channels are identical in behavior.  Deleted cal files and ran full cal with no change.  Unit is very clean and has the last software version offered and also the last, fastest motherboard.

I realize that current  models have much improved triggering.  On another unmentioned brand of scopes I've always been able to trigger right up to the specified scope bandwidth before aliasing and other things kick in.   

REPLIES:

Generally, the HW Trigger BW of scopes, in the past, has been approximately half the scope BW. There are also sensitivity specifications, so depending on the signal magnitude, you can trigger on higher BW signals. Newer Agilent/Keysight scopes have a "Trigger Sensitivity" button, that can give higher BW triggering.

That said, there are also digital scopes that 'fake' a higher BW. They use a hidden 'Auto' trigger mode (which forces a trigger if there's no trigger event within a short period of time), then look for an edge near the center of the trace in SW, and move that to the middle of the display. If it happens fast enough, it is indistinguishable from a 'real' trigger. It's very hard to determine if this is being done.

You don't indicate the brand on the 3 GHz scope, or the frequency of the sinusoidal signal you used to test it, so I can't comment on that part .

Al

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    deninnh
    deninnh @ algoss on Jan 23, 2015 12:38 PM
    Hi Al,

    Thanks for the quick reply.

    I was applying a clean sine wave between 1GHz and 2.5GHz, but suspended the BW test of my "new" scope when it wouldn't get past 1GHz.  (it will actually trigger at all up to around 1.2GHz but with much jitter on the trace).

    Last night I ran the trigger sensitivity test in the service manual and it passes, but tests are only at 100MHz,  500MHz and 1GHz.

    The "other" was a TDS694C and it delivers a cleanly triggered waveform almost up to 3GHz (its BW).

    SInce there is no spec beyond 1GHz for this model, I may not have a leg to stand on for returning this scope to the dealer.

    We have a 3000X (1GHz) and 4000X (2.5GHz) at work and I noticed that the trigger spec no longer mentions at what frequency (as far as I recall).  Likewise for the other brand.  It is Y range sensitive but not frequency dependent.  These models are converting me to Agilent but my home lab budget says "old Agilent".

    So, if this scope triggers "ok" at 1GHz, would you say that was normal for the model?

    Thanks for your help.

    Den
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        algoss
        algoss Employee @ deninnh on Jan 23, 2015 12:56 PM
        Yes, I would say that since it triggers at 1GHz, it is working as specified. The fact that it's "jittery" at 1.2 GHz is proof, at least to me, that it's a real trigger, not one of the "fake" triggers I mentioned.

        The 3000X and 4000X only talk about trigger BW in terms of trigger sensitivity at different bandwidths.

        For many measurements that people are making with higher speed scopes, Edge trigger BW becomes less important. When looking at jitter, for instance, the trigger location is not part of the equation at all. The only thing that matters is the timebase, and the location of the edges.

        Al
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            deninnh
            deninnh @ algoss on Jan 23, 2015 3:27 PM
            Thanks again Al. 

            I decided to be practical about this and try it in a real world application, USB HS verification.  The trigger was good enough but of less importance since the test is done on data from a single sweep, triggered by a pulse width condition.

            It worked flawlessly and blows away the old TDS in terms of ease of use and fast storage (good old 1GB flash drive under Win98).

            Den

[nctnico]

I'm aware of that limitation. It still is a good buy IMHO. I bought the 54835A specifically for looking at digital signals and it does that OK. It already has done some work to pay for itself.

[eurofox]

Here's the 54846A. Just two resistors need to be de-populated, so my drawing is at least correct for the 54846A.

I have a fully working 54845A that pass all test and calibrate without problem and I did the change to make it a 54846A.
It detect that it is a 54846A but testing give a lot of error and finally crash!

This mean that software is different and maybe attenuators and other parts …

It could be as well that during installation of the software that is encapsulated in the installation software different versions are installed depending of the resistor selecting the model.

[Jwalling]

Here's the 54846A. Just two resistors need to be de-populated, so my drawing is at least correct for the 54846A.

I have a fully working 54845A that pass all test and calibrate without problem and I did the change to make it a 54846A.
It detect that it is a 54846A but testing give a lot of error and finally crash!

This mean that software is different and maybe attenuators and other parts …

It could be as well that during installation of the software that is encapsulated in the installation software different versions are installed depending of the resistor selecting the model.

It's not the software. I have one Symantec Ghost image that works in all the scopes in this series with the FIC motherboard.
The scopes are 54810A, 54815A, 54820A 54825A, 54835A, 54845A, and 54846A.

[eurofox]

Here's the 54846A. Just two resistors need to be de-populated, so my drawing is at least correct for the 54846A.

I have a fully working 54845A that pass all test and calibrate without problem and I did the change to make it a 54846A.
It detect that it is a 54846A but testing give a lot of error and finally crash!

This mean that software is different and maybe attenuators and other parts …

It could be as well that during installation of the software that is encapsulated in the installation software different versions are installed depending of the resistor selecting the model.

It's not the software. I have one Symantec Ghost image that works in all the scopes in this series with the FIC motherboard.
The scopes are 54810A, 54815A, 54820A 54825A, 54835A, 54845A, and 54846A.

It is working in the 548446A mode not calibrated, I did not check the performance to check if the modification work, the software ask to do a calibration what I try and fail on all channels, I start again with a test and got a lot of errors and finally the software crash.
It cross my mind to replace the 0 ohm resistor with a switch wired to the back of the scope because it is not a good idea to "play" with the board due to EMC and connector issues but just put the resistor back, 1.5Ghz is not that bad 

[Converter]

In some miraculous way, my Agilent 54845A turned into 54845B (at least so it is now shown).



I made a motherboard update and a software update v.4.5 for 54845B. I tried different versions of software, but only with this I got success.

Previously, there was an Atlas PCI-III Series 757 motherboard based on Socket 7 and AMD K6-2 300 MHz processor and 64 MB RAM.

Now the most advanced motherboard for AT-form factor with Intel 440BX chipset and Socket 370, with 133MHz bus, where the Coppermine core Pentium III processor can be installed, up to 1133MHz (or with a small upgrade of Tualatin 1400MHz) and 3x256 MB of RAM max.

The new motherboard is designated Tomato (ZIDA) 60-cbxict1
Next to her on the photo is an old motherboard Atlas Series 757


I also had to replace the Ethernet controller for the PCI slot








At the moment I used a P III - 733MHz processor.
Subjectively, now I noticed a significantly smaller loss of the frequency of updates to the oscillogram in the mode of activation of measuring functions, than it was before.







p.s.
Now I found information that the manufacturer installs in the 54845B motherboard "VP22 Motorola" (Socket 370) and processor Celeron/Pentium III - 866 (Coppermine). Thus, we can assume that I received the same without changing the form factor AT. The only difference is that I still do not have a built-in CD-ROM, but it's not required too often.

[Jwalling]

In some miraculous way, my Agilent 54845A turned into 54845B (at least so it is now shown).

I made a motherboard update and a software update v.4.5 for 54845B. I tried different versions of software, but only with this I got success.

Previously, there was an Atlas PCI-III Series 757 motherboard based on Socket 7 and AMD K6-2 300 MHz processor and 64 MB RAM.

Now the most advanced motherboard for AT-form factor with Intel 440BX chipset and Socket 370, with 133MHz bus, where the Coppermine core Pentium III processor can be installed, up to 1133MHz (or with a small upgrade of Tualatin 1400MHz) and 3x256 MB of RAM max.

The new motherboard is designated Tomato (ZIDA) BXv98-CU/v693

Are you sure about the new motherboard part #? I ask because the images for it all show a Via chipset: https://www.google.com/search?q=BXv98-CU/v693&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwit6P26rbbXAhWKy4MKHSNOBswQsAQILg&biw=1518&bih=934

One on eBay has a Via chipset as well: https://www.ebay.com/itm/Tomato-Board-ZIDA-BXv98-CU-V693-Socket-370-Motherboard-4-PCI-2-ISA-AGP-slots/182114467065?hash=item2a66de3cf9:g:JG4AAOSwIjNXJcE3

[Converter]

Hi Jwalling,
It looks like there really is a ZIDA motherboard with exactly the same external design, but with VIA chipsets. But on my board a set of Intel chips is actually installed. On my board there is only an inscription: 60-cbxict1 30-00 (I edited my previous post).
The manual was not found, but the display shows: -440BX-
BIOS allows to overclock the processor bus up to 150 MHz, which corresponds to the specification 440BX.

[Jwalling]

Hi Jwalling,
It looks like there really is a ZIDA motherboard with exactly the same external design, but with VIA chipsets. But on my board a set of Intel chips is actually installed. On my board there is only an inscription: 60-cbxict1 30-00 (I edited my previous post).
The manual was not found, but the display shows: -440BX-
BIOS allows to overclock the processor bus up to 150 MHz, which corresponds to the specification 440BX.

Thanks for the clarification. Have you thought about upgrading it to a 2.25GHz 54846A/B? 

[Converter]

Thanks for the clarification. Have you thought about upgrading it to a 2.25GHz 54846A/B? 

Yes, I want to follow your example. In any case, I will try. Has someone succeeded in the calibration procedure after changing 54845 to 54846?

I also have a couple of questions: how to get access to the Windows desktop in this device? What drivers are needed to use usb flash memory to save screenshots in it?

[eurofox]

Thanks for the clarification. Have you thought about upgrading it to a 2.25GHz 54846A/B? 

Yes, I want to follow your example. In any case, I will try. Has someone succeeded in the calibration procedure after changing 54845 to 54846?

I also have a couple of questions: how to get access to the Windows desktop in this device? What drivers are needed to use usb flash memory to save screenshots in it?

I did the removal of the resistor to change my 54845 to 54846 but many errors in test and crash finally the test program.

Calibration attempt fail immediately.

Windows function is easy just by "Ctl key" and "esc key" on the keyboard.

I got my usb working but don't think I used a special driver, I suppose it is available in Windows 98.

I collected a usb driver that I find just by google somewhere on the net but did not use it.

[Jwalling]

Thanks for the clarification. Have you thought about upgrading it to a 2.25GHz 54846A/B? 

Yes, I want to follow your example. In any case, I will try. Has someone succeeded in the calibration procedure after changing 54845 to 54846?

I also have a couple of questions: how to get access to the Windows desktop in this device? What drivers are needed to use usb flash memory to save screenshots in it?

I think you'll be the first to upgrade to a 54846 successfully if it works!

Is this the right manual? http://www.elhvb.com/mboards/zida/manuals/CreatN10.zip
(Manual covers a slot processor version as well)

There is an "upgrade" for Win98 USB thumb drive support out there. It does work on these scopes.
It's been quite awhile since I did it, but IIRC it was this link that worked for me: http://www.technical-assistance.co.uk/kb/usbmsd98.php

The desktop on these is weird, I've never been able to customize it, but I didn't spend much time on it either.
I don't think you can minimize the scope app, only kill it with CTRL ALT DEL or possibly with CTRL ESC and end it from the taskbar.

[Converter]

Jay, your manual seems to fit (page 14).

I tried to reset the jumper, as you described. It really does now show 54846B. However, the calibration was not successful for each of the 4 channels. I do not know what is the reason, I think there are hardware differences that do not allow to make an upgrade 54845 to 54846 (or fine-tune the input amplifiers).

eurofox, thanks, I'll try to do it. I correctly understand that now you have the opportunity to use a usb flash to save the screenshot files?

[eurofox]

Jay, your manual seems to fit (page 14).

I tried to reset the jumper, as you described. It really does now show 54846B. However, the calibration was not successful for each of the 4 channels. I do not know what is the reason, I think there are hardware differences that do not allow to make an upgrade 54845 to 54846 (or fine-tune the input amplifiers).

eurofox, thanks, I'll try to do it. I correctly understand that now you have the opportunity to use a usb flash to save the screenshot files?

Yes I have replaced the floppy disk by 2 usb connectors and I can copy files.

[Converter]

Agilent program is more convenient to close "CTRL" + "F4".
In the original set, Windows did not have a suitable driver for flash memory. I installed this driver: http://www.technical-assistance.co.uk/kb/win98fe-usb-mass-storage-drivers.php
Now there's a removable disk (:E) and it works great.

Maybe someone managed to upgrade to Windows 2K?

[Jwalling]

Maybe someone managed to upgrade to Windows 2K?

That's the one thing I think is impossible. The problem is that there's no 2K drivers for the acquisition controller.

It's surprising that the 54845A can't be upgraded to a working 54846A. All the magic in these scopes are in the attenuator assemblies and A/D converters. Both models use the same parts - the A/D converters are part #1NB7-8353 and the Attenuator modules are 54512-63402 for both models. There must be some other minor modification needed...

I still have this 54846A in my possession, and I have some scrap 54845A ACQ boards laying around. Maybe I'll do a in-depth comparison between the two today if I get a chance.

[Jwalling]

Curiosity got the better of me and I couldn't resist waiting.

Here's another difference I found on the solder side under PGA device U91

Two resistors are not installed on the 54846A!

[Converter]

That's the one thing I think is impossible. The problem is that there's no 2K drivers for the acquisition controller.

There is one guy on this forum who was able to modify the WinXP drivers for the oscilloscope LeCroy WavePro7k, that they now work in Win7. I do not exclude anyone could do or have already done similar and the drivers Agilent Win98.

It's surprising that the 54845A can't be upgraded to a working 54846A. All the magic in these scopes are in the attenuator assemblies and A/D converters. Both models use the same parts - the A/D converters are part #1NB7-8353 and the Attenuator modules are 54512-63402 for both models.

Yes, I'm also surprised at this. I tried to restart the calibration 3 times and always got a negative result. In this case, the test of the input channels gave an error almost instantly, as if he had seen forgery in advance.

Here's another difference I found on the solder side under PGA device U91
Two resistors are not installed on the 54846A!

Are you sure that the presence of these resistors is essential? It would be good to check this: remove these resistors and try to do the calibration procedure without them. If you get the same negative result as I do, it will be a breakthrough (by the way, what is the value of these resistors?).

[Jwalling]

Are you sure that the presence of these resistors is essential? It would be good to check this: remove these resistors and try to do the calibration procedure without them. If you get the same negative result as I do, it will be a breakthrough (by the way, what is the value of these resistors?).

What I'm saying is that the 54846A does not have the resistors installed so there's nothing to remove. Your 54845A (if I'm right) has them installed. They are 261 Ohms in the 54845A.

Looking a bit closer now; there may be a little more to this:
The other two resistors right next to those that are installed in both boards have different values as well.
On the 54845A they are 90.9 Ohms (marked in blue). In the 54846A (also marked in blue) they are 68.1 Ohms.

[Converter]

Are you sure that the presence of these resistors is essential? It would be good to check this: remove these resistors and try to do the calibration procedure without them. If you get the same negative result as I do, it will be a breakthrough (by the way, what is the value of these resistors?).

What I'm saying is that the 54846A does not have the resistors installed so there's nothing to remove. Your 54845A (if I'm right) has them installed. They are 261 Ohms in the 54845A.

Looking a bit closer now; there may be a little more to this:
The other two resistors right next to those that are installed in both boards have different values as well.
On the 54845A they are 90.9 Ohms (marked in blue). In the 54846A (also marked in blue) they are 68.1 Ohms.

I made changes according to your description. Removed 2 resistors 261 Ohms and replaced 2 resistors 91 Ohm by 68 Ohm. Unfortunately, after this absolutely nothing has changed. The calibration process is still without success. So I returned everything to its original state.

[nctnico]

To me it seems these resistors are some kind of termination network for signals so it doesn't surprise me that nothing changed.

I think it is time to take hires pictures of boards from the 845 & 846 and subtract them in photo editing software to highlight the differences.

[Converter]

I investigated the bandwidth of my HP54845 in the factory settings. It seems that it has more than 2 GHz without any upgrade. As the source of the broadband signal, I used an industrial noise generator on avalanche-passing diodes (0.4-4 GHz). This is a very primitive device and there is a noticeable frequency unevenness in the spectrum of the generated signal. Indeed, in its generated spectrum there is a rise in the region of 100-300 MHz and a dip at 1.8 GHz. Nevertheless, this allows us to approximately estimate the bandwidth of the oscilloscope.

[nctnico]

The measurements I did showed my uphacked 54845 is just right by looking at the risetime. Unfortunately these scopes won't trigger on signals over 1GHz so maybe your noise measurement shows a more complete picture.

[Converter]

I added screenshots.
Unfortunately at the moment I do not have a high-quality microwave generator to make measurements more accurately (yes, I know about the limitations of the trigger). But a rough estimate can be made using this noise generator. There were used 2 scales: 10 dB/div and 5 dB/div. I have roughly noted positions with cursors corresponding to a -3 dB change in the level. This corresponds to a bandwidth of 2.127 GHz.

[Converter]

This oscilloscope HP 54845 is not inferior to the bandwidth of my LeCroy WavePro7200.
For comparison, I attach several measurements made in the same way with other of my oscilloscopes (FFT 10dB/div):
LeCroy WavePro7200;
LeCroy WavePro7300A;
LeCroy DDA-120;
LeCroy LC564DL;
Tektronix TDS5054B.

I also want to note that the HP 54845 demonstrated a restart speed of the trigger, which reaches 92 us (in the case of the easiest acquisition settings). This corresponds to processing 11K oscillograms per second, which is 30-50 times faster than all oscilloscopes from my list above (3-5 ms minimum). Faster than this, only the FastACQ-mode in Tek 5054 (7 us) - but this mode is not fully functional, and my analog oscilloscope LA354 (which reaches 1 us).

[Gerhard_dk4xp]

Maybe someone managed to upgrade to Windows 2K?

That's the one thing I think is impossible. The problem is that there's no 2K drivers for the acquisition controller.

There must be an upgrade kit that consists of one or two RAM modules, an XP license and
obviously, the drivers for XP. So, they must exist somewhere.

N5383A Infiniium Performance Upgrade kit   for 54846B
win98 ? XP pro   256MB ? 512 MB  $495

I have a 54846B that booted increasingly slow and finally the disk showed many read errors.
I replaced the 20 G unit by a 80G unit that I used to have in a Dell Laptop and reserved
some of the space for a Linux Partition. (Knoppix) That made it easy to setup the new Win98.
For the fun of it, I even succeded to run Libre Office on the 54846B, but it was slow as
molasse.  Somewhere I have a screen shot. 

regards,
Gerhard

[Gerhard_dk4xp]

From <  http://www.probe.co.il/Documents/Infiniium%20548xx%20Series%20probe%20accessories%20and%20option.pdf  >

[nctnico]

Maybe someone managed to upgrade to Windows 2K?

That's the one thing I think is impossible. The problem is that there's no 2K drivers for the acquisition controller.

There must be an upgrade kit that consists of one or two RAM modules, an XP license and
obviously, the drivers for XP. So, they must exist somewhere.

N5383A Infiniium Performance Upgrade kit   for 54846B
win98 ? XP pro   256MB ? 512 MB  $495

I have come to the same conclusion. Windows XP runs OK on my 54845 and the software should be compatible as well but the driver for the acquisition card is missing. I have pulled all my Google-fu tricks and then some but I have not been able to find the drivers. I wish someone would make the XP drivers available because Windows XP has better support for USB devices.

[Converter]

From <  http://www.probe.co.il/Documents/Infiniium%20548xx%20Series%20probe%20accessories%20and%20option.pdf  >

It seems this applies to the software for Infiniium 54830, -31, -32. I'm not sure, but I think that it uses advanced ACQ board and faster data transfer interface. It may be that the software for 54830 (1) is not compatible with the oscilloscopes 54825, -35, -45(6). You could check this by installing the disk image for 54830. A link to the archive containing the disk image  I saw somewhere in this topic.

[Jwalling]

Maybe someone managed to upgrade to Windows 2K?

That's the one thing I think is impossible. The problem is that there's no 2K drivers for the acquisition controller.

There must be an upgrade kit that consists of one or two RAM modules, an XP license and
obviously, the drivers for XP. So, they must exist somewhere.

N5383A Infiniium Performance Upgrade kit   for 54846B
win98 ? XP pro   256MB ? 512 MB  $495

I have come to the same conclusion. Windows XP runs OK on my 54845 and the software should be compatible as well but the driver for the acquisition card is missing. I have pulled all my Google-fu tricks and then some but I have not been able to find the drivers. I wish someone would make the XP drivers available because Windows XP has better support for USB devices.

I'm certain that XP was never used in these first generation Infiniium scopes: 54810A through 54825A, 54835A, 54845A, and 54846A.
B versioned scopes are another matter, as are the 54830 and 54850 series...

If you really want better/native USB support, Win ME (yuck) is certainly possible. 

[Tony_G]

From the upgrade PDF these models at some point supported XP:

For models 54830B, 54830D, 54831B, 54831D, 54832B, 54832D, 54833A, 54833D

These models were originally released with the Windows 98 operating system. Newer units and
upgraded older units run Windows XP.

You could try copying the drivers from the ghost image locations for the Win98 bits(c:\windows\system32\drivers and c:\windows\inf directories). If the driver is a full 32 bit driver then there is a chance that it will work under Windows XP. Alternatively you could do the same thing with the WinXP image (c:\windows\system32\drivers )assuming acquisition card didn't change much (the driver might include support for the older cards)

TonyG
[Edited for clarity and my misreading of the PDF]

[nctnico]

You can't use Win98 drivers on XP because the driver model is completely different.

[Tony_G]

You can't use Win98 drivers on XP because the driver model is completely different.

That isn't completely correct.

Windows Driver Model (WDM) was introduced in Win98. The previous driver model was VxD and it is also supported in Win98. That said, the driver in the WinXP image may be based on WDM and may be able to be used on Win98 - WinXP introduced new WDM features so a WinXP WDM driver may not work on Win98/Win2K but a Win98/Win2K WDM driver will work on WinXP.

Of course the driver could also be based on Windows Driver Foundation and thus be basically XP and up (ignoring UMDF & KMDF distinctions).

So there is a chance that the driver from the XP image will work on the Win98 one.

TonyG

[dogbert]

I think the naming scheme used by Agilent/HP for the 54XXX series are confusing (546XX and 548XX has some models that might be mistaken as the other series).

For Infiniiums, 54830 series means 5483X where X is 1 or 2. They are the ones using VP22 motherboard that you can modernize to Win XP.

548X5 is the high bandwidth old Infiniium with the same PC software as the 5481X, 5482X that are hopelessly Windows 98. The 54835 you are talking about belongs to the same class as 54845 and 54855, which has nothing to do with the so-called '54830' series.

Hope it helps.

[Jwalling]

I think the naming scheme used by Agilent/HP for the 54XXX series are confusing (546XX and 548XX has some models that might be mistaken as the other series).

For Infiniiums, 54830 series means 5483X where X is 1 or 2. They are the ones using VP22 motherboard that you can modernize to Win XP.

548X5 is the high bandwidth old Infiniium with the same PC software as the 5481X, 5482X that are hopelessly Windows 98. The 54835 you are talking about belongs to the same class as 54845 and 54855, which has nothing to do with the so-called '54830' series.

Hope it helps.

That's not quite correct. The 54850 series (54853A, 54854A, and 54855A) use the newer VP22 motherboard as well and came with XP. I know, because I just finished a repair on a 54855A for a  customer.

EDIT: I think a good way to tell whether they are first or second generation (or later) Infiniiums, is if it says "Megazoom" on the front panel.

[dogbert]

I don't recall mentioning anything about 54850 series on my post, but I know the difference between the VP22 boards can be removed by upgrading the BIOS supplied by Agilent.

Nonetheless, I agree with you that the best way to tell which generation it is by whether it has Megazoom. Also note that the 54830 series might come with an ADlink motherboard instead of Motorola VP22. The ADlink board has only 3 PCI slots that you have to use the combo card if you don't want to lose the GPIB. The downside is that the combo card does not work on old acquisition board, and it's not easy to tell without trial and error (I don't have a list of serial number ranges to tell which Acq board works with the combo card).

[Converter]

Update on my scope:
USB: My motherboard support 2 USB connections on the motherboard.

I bought this unit: http://electromyne.de/Server-Parts-Supermicro-FPUSB813-Server-Front-Panel-2x-USB-Serial-COM-RS232-Silver-Silber.html
Fit perfectly in the place of the original floppy, com port as well on the front.
It is plug & play and no need to pray, cables, screws all fit perfectly, com2 is now connected to the front panel. 

Manage in the bios to disable the floppy and work without problem with the floppy removed. 

I added as well memory, very cheap from the same shop and was shipped in 2 days door to door from Germany. 

Got the exact colour to repair the little scratches and blemish, now my scope is in a real mint condition.

Install a pdf printer emulator. 

Now hunting for probes. 

I made a plastic overlay for the usb front panel (https://www.ebay.com/itm/202029998994). It was easy and now it looks like the original part. The whole process is shown in the photo.

[Converter]

I recommend using the trackball, as Agilent suggests.
I found this part (with the Compaq logo) at a very low price in China. I bought 2 pcs in almost new condition for 99 yuan per piece (approximately $ 15).
One of them I dyed in the color of the front panel of the oscilloscope, using colors of two shades of gray. In reality, it looks more harmonious than in the photo and most importantly, that it does not require free space on the table.

[Converter]

In the supplied software, the Windows desktop is locked. If you want to have the usual access to the desktop in Windows 98 you can do this only by editing the system registry. You can use the built-in utility Registry Editor. For this go to "start->run" and enter "regedit". You need to change the value of NoDesktop to 0, as on the attached photo. Address in the register: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Policies\Explorer\NoDesktop

I have added usb ports to the front panel, so I no longer use a floppy device (drive A, B). However, despite deactivating them in Bios, I've seen drives A and B in the file manager.
You can also hide them, if you do not use them, using the System Registry setting. Address in the register:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Policies\Explorer\NoDrives
Depending on the value, different drive letters are hidden, 00 00 00 00 - none is hidden.
Value 1 - hides disk A
Value 2 - hides the disk B
Value 3 - hides disks A and B.

[Gerhard_dk4xp]

My 54846B motherboard also has a normal floppy controller, in addition
to the exotic 120MB combi drive. That could help if the special drive is
defective and cannot be found as a replacement part. The Plug is directly
at the front side of the motherboard.

What drivers do I need for USB sticks under Win98? I could live with
the built-in interfaces on the back side and an external extension cable.
Sticks do not work in my configuration.

regards, Gerhard

[Converter]

I found 2 processor Pentium III 1000 MHz (see photo). One of them is a later release and has a heat-distributing cover. However, they are both with the Coppermine core, so I do not need to modify the socket and change the Bios to switch i440BX to Tualatin.
Both processors excellently bother at a bus frequency of 140 MHz, but not one of them could not work reliably at 150 MHz.

For cooling, I bought a cooler intended for Socket 462 (Socket A). When it was delivered, it was twice the size of what was in my Socket 370, but there was not the slightest obstacle to its easy installation in the motherboard.
It has a bifurcated bracket attached to the 4 protrusions of the socket, in contrast to the radiator for socket 370, which is attached to only 2 ledges. So it seems that this is kept much more stable.

The image from the hard disk was successfully transferred to the IDE SSD and the partition was increased to 16 GB using the alignment operation. This inexpensive drive showed sequential read speed of about 85MB/s, which is 1 order of magnitude greater than the old disc, but the most bottleneck here is Hard Disk Controller - PIO Mode 5/DMA Mode 3 (33.3MB/S).
Probably a better solution is to use a separate expansion card in a PCI slot with a sata controller. But then the loading of an individual BIOS for such a controller will be added during the start of the computer, which can again worsen the start time of the device.

[Converter]

What drivers do I need for USB sticks under Win98? I could live with
the built-in interfaces on the back side and an external extension cable.

Hi,
I used these:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/agilent-54835a-scope-(4-channel-1ghz-4gss)-repair-uphack/msg1347291/#msg1347291

[JanNousiainen]

Well I got mine working again with clean install of 3.5 recovery CD:)

I had to borrow Mac G5 DVD drive that had IDE interface and use Rasp Pi GPIO extender ribbon cable to connect it to scope. After that it was smooth sailing and now my unit runs on Windows 98. I might install later updates if I feel brave someday.

Only problem was in calibration. I used too long BNC- BNC cable (1.5 - 2 m) to connect channels to AUX OUT and calibration would fail. I switched to 25 cm long better quality SMA + BNC adapter - BNC cable and no problems after that.

Now I just need to figure what I want to do with the scope...

[Converter]

Only problem was in calibration. I used too long BNC- BNC cable (1.5 - 2 m) to connect channels to AUX OUT and calibration would fail. I switched to 25 cm long better quality SMA + BNC adapter - BNC cable and no problems after that.

It's strange. I used to calibrate the cables of different lengths and the process is always successful. I know that the instruction requires a short cable, just wondering, for what reason is the cable length important here?

Now I just need to figure what I want to do with the scope...

You, like me, want to convert oscilloscope to Windows XP

[Tony_G]

for what reason is the cable length important here?

The cable length will impact the rise time of the calibration pulses.

TonyG

[tautech]

for what reason is the cable length important here?

The cable length will impact the rise time of the calibration pulses.

TonyG

But more importantly are differing propagation delays between channels with different length cables.. Scopes will detect this and if it's outside predefined parameters the calibration will fail.

[Tony_G]

But more importantly are differing propagation delays between channels with different length cables.. Scopes will detect this and if it's outside predefined parameters the calibration will fail.

Yes - Don't change cables in the middle of the calibration. That is technically known as 'Bad'.

That said, I don't believe that this scope (54845A) uses the calibration signal to perform any analysis of propagation delay. According to the service manual the scope only self calibrates for channel sensitivity, voltage offsets, and trigger parameters (hold-off etc not being dependent on the propagation time through the cable but on the accuracy of the internal time base).

Anyway, as Tautech noted, if the cable is too long it will impact all of these values and cause the calibration to fail even though the underlying scope HW is working correctly.

TonyG

[Converter]

It seems that this depends more on the quality of the cable and the connectors in the impedance matched coaxial line. I have an example when a short BNC connector (0.3m) shows a worse bandwidth than a high quality one with a length of 1.5m (I see it by the result of the rise time). However, all of them give a positive result of HP 54845 calibration. So, if the delay time does not matter and you have a high-quality cable, then this should not be a problem.

[JanNousiainen]

My first cable was thick and black (RG58?) with BNC connectors, from china of course.

Second cable was thin and coppery (RG316?) but also about max 1/5th of length of first one. I think this one was much better quality compared to first one.

[Converter]

Yes, RG58 cable is not good for this case.

[Converter]

Hello everyone.
Now I was able to install a 1400MHz P-III Tualatin processor. This required editing the BIOS (a lot of attempts before the success).


To install it, you needed an adapter PCB.


Of some tests, its performance is higher than the original K6-2-300 in 4 times. It is even ahead of some P4.


I also added preventively small radiators to the power converter.


I was surprised when I measured the frequency of the trigger restart. This amounted to 54 microseconds (18-19 kHz). This is many times higher than the one declared in the datasheet of 2 kHz. In the photo - the impulses start trigger 54845, measured using LeCroy.


Indeed, I see a lot of "threads" this device processes in real-time mode.

[nctnico]

Hello everyone.
Now I was able to install a 1400 MHz P-III processor. This required editing the BIOS (a lot of attempts before the success).

So cool! 
I'd love to get some extra performance. Unfortunately it seems yours has a different motherboard than mine so your BIOS is likely not to work on my scope.

[Converter]

nctnico, what is your motherboard? It seems to me that any motherboard that supports the Coppermine core is suitable for upgrading BIOS. I can give contacts to the person who will help you.

[nctnico]

nctnico, what is your motherboard? It seems to me that any motherboard that supports the Coppermine core is suitable for upgrading BIOS. I can give contacts to the person who will help you.

My motherboard is the original VA503-A Super Socket 7 motherboard but I now realise that you must have changed the motherboard.

[Converter]

My motherboard is the original VA503-A Super Socket 7 motherboard but I now realise that you must have changed the motherboard.

Yes, as I wrote in this thread, I installed the ZIDA TomatoBoard ZX98-CT motherboard (for Socket 370) and it was immediately successful with the HP54845A (with the Coppermine processor). It took only a little effort to translate it into a Tualatin processor. These Baby-AT motherboards today are very cheap, so it makes sense to buy and install them. I buy them in my region for only $4-6.
I also got the motherboard PC Partner BSBS3-T871B http://support.pcpartner.com/support/bios/i810.htm (see attached photo). It has a newer intel® 810 series chipsets. This is better than chipset Intel 443BX/ZX in that it supports IDE Ultra DMA4-66 (and not only DMA2-33).

[nctnico]

I'm wondering if an ATX motherboard will fit if the printer port is removed and whether the software works without the GPIB card. I have an old PC with a Core2 duo 2GHz-ish in it which I wouldn't mind butchering. It will need the extra 12V ATX plug though but I think I can botch something.

[Converter]

1. I think it's possible to use an ATX motherboard of suitable width if you are ready for a lot of work with a rasp .
2. You can remove the GPIB controller card right now to check this. You can also try to use such a controller for the PCI interface.
3. The power connector can be used from any unnecessary power supply, the starting PIN can be activated permanently, or via a delay circuit.

[free_electron]

machines work fine without the gpib

[nctnico]

1. I think it's possible to use an ATX motherboard of suitable width if you are ready for a lot of work with a rasp .

I'm just hoping the keyboard connector lines up a bit. I'll probably just desolder the plugs which stick out of the motherboard if I go ahead with this.

[osiris2099]

Hello dear members, I currently have an issue with the GAL16vd8 chip on the scope. Next to the BIOS and RTC. Its fried and I cannot retrieve any info. Nor would the scope boot. Does anybody have the option to get the code from this chip labeled 1996 ami 73xx PODxxx and email it to me. thanks for your reply,
If you need pictures or else, please let me know, Best regards,
Nicolas

[Gandalf_Sr]

I just put a low offer in for an Agilent 54835A on eBay "parts or not working" status - screen shows nothing.  Maybe they'll accept, maybe not.  What should I be looking for?  Is the Agilent 54845A a whole lot better?

[nctnico]

I just put a low offer in for an Agilent 54835A on eBay "parts or not working" status - screen shows nothing.  Maybe they'll accept, maybe not.  What should I be looking for?  Is the Agilent 54845A a whole lot better?

You can uphack the '835A to an '845A by changing a few resistors. You get double the samplerate on all channels and 1.5GHz bandwidth if you only use channel 1 and 3.

[Jwalling]

Hello dear members, I currently have an issue with the GAL16vd8 chip on the scope. Next to the BIOS and RTC. Its fried and I cannot retrieve any info. Nor would the scope boot. Does anybody have the option to get the code from this chip labeled 1996 ami 73xx PODxxx and email it to me. thanks for your reply,
If you need pictures or else, please let me know, Best regards,
Nicolas

I may be able to help if it's not protected, and my programmer supports the device (I think it does). I'll follow up tomorrow...
In the meantime, please post the VIN # from the rear of the scope.

[Gandalf_Sr]

My low ball offer was declined, so be it.  I'm not paying $900 for an as-is broken scope + $100 shipping.

[TheSteve]

My low ball offer was declined, so be it.  I'm not paying $900 for an as-is broken scope + $100 shipping.

Run fast and far at $900.00.

[Jwalling]

I just put a low offer in for an Agilent 54835A on eBay "parts or not working" status - screen shows nothing.  Maybe they'll accept, maybe not.  What should I be looking for?  Is the Agilent 54845A a whole lot better?

There's a pretty good chance that the failure on that one, is bulging caps on the FIC motherboard, BTW. But I wouln't pay more than $600 to $700 if I were interested.

[Gandalf_Sr]

Thanks guys, what about the 500 MHz version, the 54815A?  Can the resistors be changed on the acquisition PCB to increase the bandwidth?

And what about this one as a risky purchase? https://www.ebay.com/itm/Agilent-54855A-54855-66413-DSO-Infinium-Oscilloscope-parts-or-repair-only/152916007613?hash=item239a811abd:g:~sUAAOSwATxajG-e

It's a 54855A chassis with no PC motherboard, drive, FDD, or cover.  If the acquisition PCB is good, it's 6 GHz with 20 Gsps on all 4 channels simultaneously!  If this were made good, it's asking price is $9,000 or more.

Can you guys tell from the photos whether the serious parts are there? What do you think would be involved to get it going?

[EDIT] the same seller has a 54855A power supply for sale, he wants $3,480 for it!  He doesn't realize that it's only worth $20!
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Agilent-HP-54855A-5110-PACC00-111-0950-4369-Power-Supply/152911922763?hash=item239a42c64b:g:KvEAAOSwn9VaiHG3

[nctnico]

And what about this one as a risky purchase? https://www.ebay.com/itm/Agilent-54855A-54855-66413-DSO-Infinium-Oscilloscope-parts-or-repair-only/152916007613?hash=item239a811abd:g:~sUAAOSwATxajG-e

Don't touch that. At least the acquisition interface board is missing. And you might need specific videocards as well.

[Tony_G]

And what about this one as a risky purchase? https://www.ebay.com/itm/Agilent-54855A-54855-66413-DSO-Infinium-Oscilloscope-parts-or-repair-only/152916007613?hash=item239a811abd:g:~sUAAOSwATxajG-e

Don't touch that. At least the acquisition interface board is missing. And you might need specific videocards as well.

Holy crap! It's missing everything including the A/D hybrids - this is worth maybe $200-300 if that - run, don't walk, run from that $1500 price. I think they even stripped some other ICs off the board. $200 might have been too generous....

TonyG

[Jwalling]

Holy crap! It's missing everything including the A/D hybrids - this is worth maybe $200-300 if that - run, don't walk, run from that $1500 price. I think they even stripped some other ICs off the board. $200 might have been too generous....

TonyG

I think the hybrids are there, but they're missing the heat sinks. But, you got to figure that they stole other parts because the ACQ board had problems...

[Jwalling]

Thanks guys, what about the 500 MHz version, the 54815A?  Can the resistors be changed on the acquisition PCB to increase the bandwidth?

And what about this one as a risky purchase? https://www.ebay.com/itm/Agilent-54855A-54855-66413-DSO-Infinium-Oscilloscope-parts-or-repair-only/152916007613?hash=item239a811abd:g:~sUAAOSwATxajG-e

It's a 54855A chassis with no PC motherboard, drive, FDD, or cover.  If the acquisition PCB is good, it's 6 GHz with 20 Gsps on all 4 channels simultaneously!  If this were made good, it's asking price is $9,000 or more.

Can you guys tell from the photos whether the serious parts are there? What do you think would be involved to get it going?

[EDIT] the same seller has a 54855A power supply for sale, he wants $3,480 for it!  He doesn't realize that it's only worth $20!
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Agilent-HP-54855A-5110-PACC00-111-0950-4369-Power-Supply/152911922763?hash=item239a42c64b:g:KvEAAOSwn9VaiHG3

The 54815A can be upgraded from 1GS/s to a 2GS/s 54825A.

Where can you get a a 54855A power supply for $20??

[Jwalling]

Hello dear members, I currently have an issue with the GAL16vd8 chip on the scope. Next to the BIOS and RTC. Its fried and I cannot retrieve any info. Nor would the scope boot. Does anybody have the option to get the code from this chip labeled 1996 ami 73xx PODxxx and email it to me. thanks for your reply,
If you need pictures or else, please let me know, Best regards,
Nicolas

I may be able to help if it's not protected, and my programmer supports the device (I think it does). I'll follow up tomorrow...
In the meantime, please post the VIN # from the rear of the scope.

Not sure if this is the correct one, but here's one from the Atlas 757 board. The security fuse was not blown.

[Gandalf_Sr]

...The 54815A can be upgraded from 1GS/s to a 2GS/s 54825A.

...Where can you get a a 54855A power supply for $20??

Thanks, what's involved in that upgrade? There are several 54815As going for reasonable money on eBay.

I thought it was just a computer power supply.  If you need one, I know where the's one going for $3,480

[Jwalling]

...The 54815A can be upgraded from 1GS/s to a 2GS/s 54825A.

...Where can you get a a 54855A power supply for $20??

Thanks, what's involved in that upgrade? There are several 54815As going for reasonable money on eBay.

I thought it was just a computer power supply.  If you need one, I know where the's one going for $3,480

Simple. Just add one resistor. This is from an old Yahoo HP/Agilent groups post I made some years ago:

I've spent some time comparing the 54815A scope to a 54825A scope and figured out how to make the 54810A and 54815A scopes run at 2GSa/s which make them the equivalent of a 54820A and 54825A scopes. In fact, once the change is done it will identify itself as such. Before doing this, make sure your scope will pass it's built in calibration routines from the utility menu. You'll have to run them again after the "upgrade"
On the Acquisition board there is a 50MHz DIP 4 pin oscillator in a DIP14 package. Right next to it you'll find a resistor (R134) that is not populated. on the 54820A and 54825A it is populated with a zero Ohm resistor. Add the part or just short it out with a solder blob then power it up. The scope will boot and say it needs calibration; run the cal routines and you'll be good to go. Have fun!

I just took a picture of a scrap board I have lying aroung and highlighted the resistor.

EDIT: Also, that's not an off the shelf power supply. It's custom made For Agilent. You could easily sell one for $1K in working condition.

[Gandalf_Sr]

Thanks, I've been looking at this one on eBay but when I zoom in on (open in a new tab) the picture, I can see a 'rejected' sticker at the top and a red 'X' alongside input number 2 - I assume a bad input channel is something that's hard to fix?

[Jwalling]

Thanks, I've been looking at this one on eBay but when I zoom in on (open in a new tab) the picture, I can see a 'rejected' sticker at the top and a red 'X' alongside input number 2 - I assume a bad input channel is something that's hard to fix?

Probably a bad attenuator or A/D converter. Easy to fix if you have the part(s) as they are easily removed. A/D converter is socketed, and the attenuator is held in by a screw or two. It says "see attached tag" Ask the seller if the tag is still on it, and what it says if it is.

EDIT: The attenuators were VERY problematic on those... Suitable donors can also be found in the 54540A 54542A and the 2CH variants.
The bid on that unit is from Watronics https://www.ebay.com/usr/watronics  He used to work for HP. I had an email conversation with awhile back about why they had so many problems. Apparently HP/Agilent knew about it, but were never able to figure what the exact problem/cure was. I think that the problem was the leaf contacts on the shuttle relays were making poor contact with the gold plated posts.

[Gandalf_Sr]

Thanks, it went for $212 plus shipping but I missed it, a reasonable price I think.  I'll keep looking.

[analogRF]

I've got an older HP branded 54845A which was failing several tests and all calibrations. I have fixed everything up. Replaced the hard drive with a compact flash, fresh install of win98 and the software with all the upgrades up to V4.5 and added memory (64MB now from 16MB before). Cleaned up the ADC ASICs etc... and now the scope passes all self tests (multiple times), passed all calibrations and everything is honky dory except a peculiar issue that was also there in the beginning when I got the scope (it used to be win95 and SW V3.72)
As you can see in the pictures, when the graphic display is enabled, all is fine and the scope works perfectly. As soon as I disable the graphic display (top right corner) the waveform is segmented as you can see. The issue is very visible on fast time bases but it also exists on slow time bases specially with low frequency square wave it is very visible and distorted
For the life of me I cannot figure out what can be wrong with it. I don't think it is the acquisition board. When I got the scope I thought it was a software/driver issue so I replaced the clunky noisy hard drive and upgraded the software but the problem persists. The only hardware issue I can think of is the display board on the PCI slot but what is in there to test?

[Tony_G]

Does it happen if you remove the additional memory? The only thing I can think of is that something is going wrong on writing the bits out to the video card memory - Maybe a DMA conflict or something like that.

TonyG

[analogRF]

yes it does. I have played with memory chips. As i explained, this also happened in the beginning before any upgrades with 16MB original RAM and win95 and V3.72.
I have no idea where to go from here...actually I just noticed if you look at the photo that I posted, when the graphic display is disabled it seems the graticule lines are not even anymore! two of them are spaced further than the others it seems...i have to check this when I get home...

[Tony_G]

I'm at a loss sorry. Interested though in what you find if you do end up finding the cause.

TonyG

[nctnico]

I suspect this is a fault on the PCI interface board. There is a connection between the video card and the PCI interface board. This is likely an interface to project an overlay onto the output of the videocard. When the PCI interface board is generating the image, something goed wrong. Likely an address line is stuck. Better retest with a triangle wave which filles the entire screen. This should give a clue about what information shows up where.

[analogRF]

that's my suspicion too but why everything is fine when the graphical display is enabled?
actually if you look at the pictures i posted, when the graphic display is disabled and waveform is distorted, clearly the graticule lines are not evenly spaced anymore neither the small ticks on the horizontal axis. they are all misplaced. I just looked at it on the scope too. I will post new pics with triangular wave in a few hours. i have to run now....

oh, btw, i put in 4 sticks of ECC memory exactly as stated in the manual of the AMI motherboard and enabled ECC check in BIOS with no effect on anything...everything remains the same...

[nctnico]

The memory on the motherboard has nothing to do with the graphics. I guess when the graphical display is enabled the CPU is used to draw the signal (and other graphics) while without the graphics the overlay generator on the interface is used. Did you already try with a triangle waveform? And how about different time/div settings?

[analogRF]

here is triangle waveform. this happens on all time bases. It's not just the waveform that is distorted. the whole graticule, the whole screen is actually distorted. Even with no signal fed to the scope (just the base line) still the graticules are distorted in that mode.

yes, I can see what you are saying about an address stuck in the video memory. But if the VGA memory on that board is bad, it should show up somewhere else, no? The two memory chips on the VGA board (NOT the interface board) are KM416C254DJ-5 which are 512KB (256K x 16 bit) chips and windows 98 reports 1MB video memory

Is it possible that someone moved the boards on PCI slots and I need to change the IRQ in the BIOS or something? You see, in the Agilent manual it says change the IRQ9 to ISA (from default PCI) but I cannot see what IRQ9 is doing. but I can see IRQ10 is given to the VGA board.

[analogRF]

vertically nothing changes and all is fine. only horizontally and only inside the graticule area everything is misplaced

[nctnico]

I'm pretty sure the distorted display is generated on the interface board and overlayed onto the video output:

Disconnect the flat cable connecting the interface board and the video card and see what happens. If I'm correct then the display won't show a signal with the menus (graphics) disabled.

[analogRF]

OK, I'll do this today but I don't think the scope will show anything if that cable is disconnected.

I ran the Video SRAM test, Video RAM test, and Video Control Register test individually and they all pass. I believe the SRAMs are on the interface board (2 x M5416283-60 chips by OKI) because the datasheet says they have RAM and SAM operation independently.

I have ordered 2 PCI extender cables and it will take some time to arrive and then I can probe around that board hopefully. In the meantime I will try to check the tantalum caps on that board

What is that battery doing in there by the way?

EDIT:  I think the SRam here means Serial access not Static

[analogRF]

what data is being kept alive in that 32KB RAM on the interface board by the battery?

I will also check the resistor arrays on these two boards. lately I have had 2 cases of resistors being open in SMD resistor arrays

[analogRF]

I'm pretty sure the distorted display is generated on the interface board and overlayed onto the video output:

Disconnect the flat cable connecting the interface board and the video card and see what happens. If I'm correct then the display won't show a signal with the menus (graphics) disabled.

I disconnected that small ribbon cable and the scope software gave an error "the acquisition refresh rate cannot be measured" (or something close to that I forgot the exact words) and then when it got to the software it says the scope is not calibrated and none of the channels could be even turned on. the display in both cases (with and w/o graphics enabled) was blank with no trace and no graticule

[nctnico]

Too bad the scope won't work with the flatcable disconnected.

The OKI M5416283 are DRAMs with fast serial ports for video purposes. Basically you can write data while the video data is being output at a constant rate. I'd check the address lines on these chips and see if any one of them is out of the ordinary (doesn't change at all or has levels half way the power supply).

[analogRF]

yes, I will do that but I need extender cables to arrive because I have no access to the boards to do any measurements...
for now I will check the basics such as pull up resistor arrays and also tantalum caps...

[analogRF]

took the boards out. checked the resistor arrays and they are all ok....so are the caps but it is hard to tell inside the circuit...the battery still has 3.2V after 20 years

[nctnico]

took the boards out. checked the resistor arrays and they are all ok....so are the caps but it is hard to tell inside the circuit...the battery still has 3.2V after 20 years

It doesn't hurt to get a magnifier and check the solder joints.

[analogRF]

of course. I did that...cleaned the contacts and put them back in and of course no change...
the scope is well calibrated and works so beautifully except that glitch when the graphic display is off
even measurements in that mode are all ok and spot on just the way that the points are drawn in the display is wrong and only in the graticule area

i wonder how it passes all those video memory tests...i will be waiting for the extender cables to come and and have another crack at it with a scope.
 

[INFINIUM]

You know why the 3volts battery is there ,I Have one HP 54845  similar ,with a DALLAS chip I think with a battery inside or is this one in the board you show?
the screen gave me the CMOS fault?  the battery was OK  3,2V??

[nctnico]

CMOS fault from the BIOS means you have a problem in the Dallas chip. You can probably source these somewhere because billions of motherboards where made using this Dallas chip. However try to see if you keep getting the error after the oscilloscope has been powered down for a day.

[analogRF]

You know why the 3volts battery is there ,I Have one HP 54845  similar ,with a DALLAS chip I think with a battery inside or is this one in the board you show?
the screen gave me the CMOS fault?  the battery was OK  3,2V??

No I was talking about the CR2032 battery on the PCI board that is the interface between the mobo and acq board. It is seen in the upper left side of your photo.  I still dont know what information that battery holds up in the SRAM that is on the same PCI board. Cal data? system state?
however I am sure it has nothing to do with motherboard CMOS (BIOS).

The CMOS error you are getting at boot time is most likely related to the battery inside the Dallas chip being dead but the system should be bootable I guess. But it probably will use default bios setup and you must properly setup the BIOS parameters every time you boot it up
until you replace that dallar chip. This is my speculation.

[INFINIUM]

Thanks ,
the OSD  was abandoned more than 15 years, almost now dead in 2000 it was OK.
First  the CMOS ERROR asked me the bios FLOPPY  , last month..
I change the video card battery that was  with 3 Vols.
nothing  the same error , next week started to suddenly stop and start ,intermittent ..
now does not start at all  , the service manual said , put the resistor to inhibit the Power supply and replace it if does not start.
I guess is true   , trying to replace the PS , but there are to many signals in the control connector , I am busy in a small garage with cars ,etc. and I need the schematics to prevent putting wrong voltages in sensible circuits. .

[INFINIUM]

Somebody can  measure the voltages coming from the  power supply  from the 2 big connectors in the HP54845 OSD  in one I think is +5 minus 5  , in the other 12v + minus and one pair XX  volts ? in total there are  5 pairs with different colours , I am trying to replace this power supply for one standard for PCs , the small white connector has the 15 volts inhibit signal and the extra for sincro.. test or something rare.
colour code  cables and voltage . in resume  I need,
if one day the PS fails you also will have less trouble.
Please be aware that without PCB cards or problem in the laching relay the PS does not turn on

[INFINIUM]

The connectors that I am investigating. 

[INFINIUM]

https://www.circuitsonline.net/forum/view/94488/25
Here there are people  and in English photos : the most beautiful apparatus in my collection In Netherlands!
there are apparatus inside and outside beautiful and more with the red green display ON .
Nice people keeping care of the 

[analogRF]

Thanks ,
the OSD  was abandoned more than 15 years, almost now dead in 2000 it was OK.
First  the CMOS ERROR asked me the bios FLOPPY  , last month..
I change the video card battery that was  with 3 Vols.
nothing  the same error , next week started to suddenly stop and start ,intermittent ..
now does not start at all  , the service manual said , put the resistor to inhibit the Power supply and replace it if does not start.
I guess is true   , trying to replace the PS , but there are to many signals in the control connector , I am busy in a small garage with cars ,etc. and I need the schematics to prevent putting wrong voltages in sensible circuits. .

could you explain what exactly happens when you push the power button?

[INFINIUM]

When I push the On buttom the front relay  made a noise , the +15 volts  inhibit voltage change like the service manual said or going lower.    The PS gives only 15v for the starting inhibit circuit , nothing more now,
this 15 volts is only for the starting PS , is explain here in POWER SUPPLY WONT POWER ON  search
The signal to start is going in series with the PCB or cards that means that one is disconected is imposible to start the PC OSD ,
To test better the PS  the service manual said to put a 200 ohms  in the small connector PS  white cables  simulating the PC  and if the PS does not start to give the 5vols 12 v plus and minus  replace the power supply PS.
When I put the resistor the same I heard the relay click but any   ps voltages out , the H Voltage dc in the PS is present but later this 250 volts is not converted in 12 -5  volts is very difficult to check the vertical card in the PS ,somebody here  in the link  PS WONT POWER ON  put a 5 volts power supply extra in the original PS Connector and start the OSD like the cars in batery failure!
the PS vertical control card has to many components condensers chips, transistors, difficult to repair ,nothing is burnt 
the modele is HP54845A  Windows 95 ,
also in the Service manual said to check the resistencia to ground in the OSD , it seems ok.
I Have one PS from the old PC  chinese that gives all the voltages when one start cable is connected to ground ,only problem s  is the power only 200 wats ..and the conexion like a heart transplant
there are tips here for others hp  PS models  : the resistor x  330k , the fuse resistor in the power transistor , nothing for this PS ,
in resume I need to buy an expensive old PS , Change the condensers etc or  put a new PS WITH NOT MISTAKES!
Thanks

[nctnico]

Did you check for shorts in the rest of the oscilloscope? Did you already try to disconnect only the acquisition board and then power on? Maybe the PSU is just fine but there is a short circuit somewhere else which makes the PSU shut down again.

[INFINIUM]

I did that and more
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/repair/agilent-infiniium-54853a-dso-won_t-power-on/

[johnwb80]

Did you ever figure out how to get it into the higher sample mode(resistor switches)? I have one of these and would be cool to max it out? Could there be one that needs to be removed to make it the higher model?

[nctnico]

You can uphack the 54835A to a 54845A. It is in the first post on page 1.

[johnwb80]

To goto 54846A (2.25GHz / 8Gs/s) mode. I didn't see that setup for the resistors anywhere.

[nctnico]

I tried all combinations (I think) but it seems the 54846A needs different attenuators.

[Converter]

To goto 54846A (2.25GHz / 8Gs/s) mode. I didn't see that setup for the resistors anywhere.

I recommend you look at page 7 of this thread.
The trigger does not work stably at a frequency of more than 1.2 GHz, even if you expand the bandwidth of its inputs to 2.2 GHz.
It makes much more sense to try to upgrade the drivers to allow the installation of Win2K or WinXP here.

[johnwb80]

sounds good thanks. I have the 54845A. I've put more memory in it and was looking for other mods. Probably will do the cpu swap I noticed on the 1st page, max the memory out, find quiet fans, Find a ide ssd hd for it probably at some point. It has the contractor for the attenuator have exceeded their expected life time notice but all 4 channels seem good so far. has anyone on here swapped out the contactors on the attenuator boards for this scope?

[Converter]

I have only these photos. Unfortunately, there is no marking.
I see 3 different relays there.

[analogRF]

I have only these photos. Unfortunately, there is no marking.
I see 3 different relays there.

so the attenuator contact counter keeps the record for which of these relays?
K2 to K4 or the white plastic relay?

[johnwb80]

I found it on one of the schematics. They're something like $60-80/ea and there's one for each ch that needs to be replaced. (from what I've read)
Looks like the contactor is the one for selecting input resistance (50 Ω or 1 MΩ) the other 2 are selectable attenuators. I'll probably swap out all 3 components with contacts on all 4 channels. I think k2 and k6 are the ones it's counting. They look similar to the  Series A150 ultraminiature Attenuator Relays. Has anyone seen a part number on any of the 6 metal can relays?

[alpher]

My motherboard is the original VA503-A Super Socket 7 motherboard but I now realise that you must have changed the motherboard.

Yes, as I wrote in this thread, I installed the ZIDA TomatoBoard ZX98-CT motherboard (for Socket 370) and it was immediately successful with the HP54845A (with the Coppermine processor). It took only a little effort to translate it into a Tualatin processor. These Baby-AT motherboards today are very cheap, so it makes sense to buy and install them. I buy them in my region for only $4-6.
I also got the motherboard PC Partner BSBS3-T871B http://support.pcpartner.com/support/bios/i810.htm (see attached photo). It has a newer intel® 810 series chipsets. This is better than chipset Intel 443BX/ZX in that it supports IDE Ultra DMA4-66 (and not only DMA2-33).

Hi , could you explain how exactly did you install the HP software on it?
Let's say that I've replaced motherboard, installed a fresh copy of windows98 on it, how do I get to install the HP scope software and drivers.
Can they somehow be extracted from the recovery image that's on the net?

[Converter]

Hello alpher,

Programs can be installed using the file manager - "Explorer", which is located under the "Start" button. Just add a keyboard and mouse. In the same place you can find access to system functions.
If necessary, close Agilent program "CTRL" + "F4".

How to activate the desktop Windows I wrote in this post:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/agilent-54835a-scope-(4-channel-1ghz-4gss)-repair-uphack/msg1385393/#msg1385393
But it seemed to me that no one expressed interest in this information.

[alpher]

Hi Converter, thatks for replying.
I've allready installed a fresh copy of windows 98 on a fresh CF card, have keyboard and mouse hooked up, as well as CD drive.
No problems accesing file manager at all since this is a standard retail version of win98,.
My question was, how do I install HP scope software ?
Maybe not so much how, more how to get the instal files, how do you extract them from the recovery image?
Or I'm I completely wrong here and you have to start from original HP recovery image?
Will it install properly on a completely different motherboard (810 chipst )?
Could you clarify it for me?
Much appreciated.

[Tony_G]

The recovery image is just a Ghost image and I don't think there is any HW fingerprinting prior to install. If you get the Win98 drivers for the board then I'd image you'd be able to install the image and then just update the drivers.  If you want to start with you're Win98 image then you could try extracting the various *.inf files from the Ghost image (if you have Ghost, if not then maybe installing the image to a VM?) and search through them for the matching HW IDs and driver files.

Personally I'd just reinstall the recovery image and go from there though.

TonyG

[Converter]

I think that there is no installation package for the HP oscilloscope program for the old HP 54810-54825/HP 54835-54846 series. In any case, I have never seen a separate installation package for this program. There are only a few versions of the disk image where this program is already integrated into Windows and there are small packages for updating its version.

I assume that absolutely any model of the motherboard that supports Windows 98 (since no one has yet been able to adapt Windows XP) and which you can fit inside the case can be used here. Motherboard drivers you can add separately after deploying a disk image.

[alpher]

OK, think I get it, will try to ghost the image over to the CF, any recommendation as to which image to try?
I've seen more than one. Scope is 54845A vin 025 (the older one with just plain floppy drive) for what it matters.
Thanks again guys.

[Converter]

It does not matter which vin#. It seems the latest version of the software v.4.5. Somewhere at the beginning of this thread there was a link to a file sharing service for downloading several versions of disk images.

I did the installation like this:
First, I connected the usual CD-drive to the IDE connector of the motherboard and, using my old CD-ROM (with resuscitation utilities), loaded the MS-DOS. Then I changed to a CDRW with the disk image file stored there and the utility for unpacking and the system was unpacked. It was very quick.

[Tony_G]

It's on my OneDrive:

In case you need it I saved a copy of the software folders from the Keysight FTP Server (they went missing last time I checked there)

https://1drv.ms/f/s!Amqar8_XQ9Uzj6YhN1xHdM8tQdKMOA

TonyG

TonyG

[alpher]

Thanks Tony, I've allready got your copy.
Burned a few different ISO will experiment tgonight.
I'll let you know the outcome.

[alpher]

OK , so here it goes:
Since I still don't have 810 chipset board that I've ordered i went ahead and installed version 4.3 recovery image from Tony's onedrive, installed on original AMI 757 motherboard.
The only change that I made was to replace busted IBM travelstar HDD that came with the unit (rattling metal inside, most likely heads broke off) with a 8GB CF in an adapter plugged directly into mobo.
Took power from USB headers nearby, the install didn't go well, after reboot I've got something ~4 BSODs , always around the time when windows was installing the drivers for IDE controller.
But I restarted couple of times anyway and eventually it came alive .
Passes self test without an issue, calibration took more than an hour , but it calibrated fine.
Is late now so I didn't try to update to 4.5 but will try tomorrow.
Should I worry about the BSODs during install ? What do you guys think?
Here are a couple of pics:

[Converter]

I think you should not worry. I, too, had it during the first boot, but I never saw any further problems during use.

[alpher]

You're right, I'm going to leave it as it is for now, just try to update to 4.5 tomorrow.
Bsods started after at the point windows asked me to choose drive for some intel ide controller,
there were 2 choices some intel number and a generic one.
Choose intel and bang bsod and hard lock , had to power cycle, after that had around 3 more bsods an had to powercycle twice or trice.
Wonder if I had chosen the generic controller things may have gone more smoothly 
I'll try it on the final board that I'm getting from a guy from Ukraine from all places, funny.
Thank you Converter for all you'r help.

[alpher]

Just a quick update,wasn't able to update software to ver4.5 yet, somehow second IDE chanel doesn't even show up when the OS starts, BiOS sees the CD drive no problem, but in windows device manager there is only the primary IDE.
I think I'm gonna wait for the 810 mobo before I try again, my idea now is to edit the GHO image, add a directory containing the 4.5 update and then use "subst" command in windows command prompt to point drive a: to the directory, in theory it should work, we'll see how it does in practice  .
In the meantime removed the acquisition board and the motherboard to some "bodywork" on the frame as mine came with a big dent in one of the back corners, luck has it didn't damage the acquisition board.
Since I have the board out , may try the 54846 uphack, we'll see.
When I removed the acq. board I noticed that the service manual mentions 9 torx screws to be removed, I counted 13  , overall removal is really easy compared to other scopes I worked on recently.
Here are some pics for the curious minds:



Here you can see how close the dent in the aluminum frame came to breaking the acq. board, luck was on my side here:









Wonder what material is the RF shield made of, is quite heavy could it be Lead ?

[alpher]

846A uphack didn't work for me as well, immediately fails calibration on all 4 channels.
Something else is at work here.
Maybe for 54846s they use a specially graded acq. boards or attenuators?

[alpher]

Just consulted service manual for these scopes, and the acq. boards have a different part numbers for 1.5 and 2.5GHz scopes, namely:
A13 54845-69527 1 4-CH ACQUISITION ASSEMBLY W/ATTENUATORS (Agilent Model 54845A)
A13 54846-69527 1 4-CH ACQUISITION ASSEMBLY W/ATTENUATORS (Agilent Model 54846A)

Even more telling is this:

A13A1
A13A2    54845-66502 2 2-CH ATTENUATOR ASSY (54835A and 54845A)

A13A1
A13A2    54846-66502 2 2-CH ATTENUATOR ASSY (54846A)

So even though the acq boards themselves may look the same, the attenuators are not.
What's significant here is that while 835A and 845A share the same attenuator assemblies, and people report successful uphack from 835 to 845.
The same is NOT true going from 845 to 846, since they have different attenuators, according to service manual at least.

[Converter]

I hope this was not unexpected for you? You have already seen the posts about the same unsuccessful attempts?

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/agilent-54835a-scope-(4-channel-1ghz-4gss)-repair-uphack/msg1347104/#msg1347104

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/agilent-54835a-scope-(4-channel-1ghz-4gss)-repair-uphack/msg1347123/#msg1347123

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/agilent-54835a-scope-(4-channel-1ghz-4gss)-repair-uphack/msg1348009/#msg1348009

Here you can see how close the dent in the aluminum frame came to breaking the acq. board, luck was on my side here:

And you can easily fix it. Simply use a hard, even base and some flat rectangles on the other side and hammer to align the dent. I often have to fix this.

[alpher]

Of course I've seen them, but the more data we have the better chances of successful hack,
Obviously now we know that there are some differences between 846 and 845 attenuators.
So someone with access to both types can find out the differences.

[alpher]

Here you can see how close the dent in the aluminum frame came to breaking the acq. board, luck was on my side here:

And you can easily fix it. Simply use a hard, even base and some flat rectangles on the other side and hammer to align the dent. I often have to fix this.

That's exactly what I did:

[Converter]

Believe me, this is all easily corrected. I came across more complex cases. Simply place another small flat bar at the height you want. I use ground metal parts. But you need to be very careful, because you can create new dents . Before this, do not forget to remove all boards from the chassis.

Update: Now I see on your new photos that you have already successfully corrected everything. Congratulations.

[Krzys]

Just a quick update,wasn't able to update software to ver4.5 yet, somehow second IDE chanel doesn't even show up when the OS starts, BiOS sees the CD drive no problem, but in windows device manager there is only the primary IDE.

What do you mean by "BiOS sees the CD drive no problem"? Do you mean that autodetection detects CD drive?

By default, only first IDE channel is enabled in WinBios setup - you need to enable both in Peripherals. (And it is being reset to defaults on each change that prompts you to enter the BIOS - for example on memory size change. Quite annoying.)

Even though secondary IDE channel is disabled in WinBios setup, BIOS could autodetect devices on that channel - but it wouldn't work anyway.

Edit: I'm probably wrong about autodetection always working, as today it detected no drive - it turned out that the setting for IDE channels was set to "None". Autodetection started working just after changing it to "Both", saving settings and reboot. It seems inconsistent to what I've observed while trying to connect CD drive previously. (OTOH Windows 95 recognized both channels just fine.)

I don't know if enabling secondary IDE channel is enough to see it in Windows.

Also please note that some CD drives might not work.

In my case I've tried some PATA laptop DVD drives. First one ("modern", DVD-RW, Sony NEC Optiarc AD-7563A from 2008, rated 1,5A) , was detected as secondary slave (my desktop IDE <-> laptop CD adapter has no jumpers), but it wasn't working (at least it was not possible to boot from it).

Second one - old 20x/2x DVD-ROM (Panasonic SR-8171C, from 1998 (yay!), specc'd at 1,8A) was detected as primary master and worked just fine - I've went through full Windows XP repair install with it.

As for +5V power supply, I've used Vcc and ground from USB connector. Somehow it was enough.

[Gemikro]

Hi folks !

i recently could acquire a four channel 54815A for free which would have been thrown away by the company otherwise 
The only defect part i found was the Dallas CMOS battery so far which was easily replaced.

The unit came with 8 probes, original keyboard and track ball.
All channels are working and can be calibrated.
I already replaced some parts as the system fans, CPU fan and the hard drive and increased system memory to 1042MB to be able to upgrade to Win98.
I also replaced the network car to a newer 3com Pci card which is working quite well and upgraded the software to version 4.5

I also would like to upgrade the scope to 54825A but did not dare to solder on the main board yet.

One bad thing is, i could not get the onboard usb controller to work yet.
I could install the 98FE usb driver and the onboard controller is recognized, but it does not detect any attached usb devices so far.

I know that 98SE has better support for usb and tried to fresh install (from Cd-Rom attached to the second IDE) or upgrade to 98SE but in both cases the installation always hangs at the hardware detection process 
Has anyone tried to install 98SE on the original Atlas III mainboard ?

Max

[Krzys]

I tried to install XP but the problem is that the drivers for the acquisition card are not available. The Windows98 drivers won't work on XP because XP is completely different when it comes to drivers.

Do you know what the VIDs/PIDs are for the acq card? Maybe in the range 15BC:0500 to 15BC:0507?

No, according to the list from the BIOS I think it is 103C:1020 (that is the only unknown PCI device listed)

I don't know if you are aware of this, but on webarchive there's an old dump of Keysight's FTP site containing something that looks like N5383A installation ISOs. Four files named M815G-T3A-Disk1.iso, M815G-T3A-Disk2.iso, M815G-T3A-Disk3.iso and M815G-T3A-Disk4.iso contains ghost image of Windows XP installation, together with drivers for graphics card and acq board - probably all revisions, including the oldest one, I see the following VEN/DEVs (acq boards olny):

Code: [Select]

VEN_15BC&DEV_0508
VEN_15BC&DEV_0507
VEN_15BC&DEV_0503
VEN_15BC&DEV_0501
VEN_15BC&DEV_0500
VEN_103C&DEV_1020xml file found in the root dir of the first CD states:

<!-- All 548xx Infiniium Models-->
<FrameDescription>
   <Device VendorID="103C" DeviceID="1020"/>
</FrameDescription>

so it explicitly lists first version of acq board (the one shipped with first Infiniiums, W95-based). That comment: "<!-- All 548xx Infiniium Models-->" is even more promising.

Anyway, I think it should work on 54832B with either acq board. I cannot test this myself, as I don't own 54832B.

However, in reality, the "All 548xx Infiniium Models" promise might be false, as I couldn't make it to work.

I had to use Atlas III based 54810 scope with lowly K6 200 MHz, upgraded to 96 MiB of RAM (I had a hard time getting my two pairs of 32 MB EDO sticks to work with each other - on each (re)boot I had a different size of ram. Of course the two pairs on their own worked just fine separately. So in the end I've used one pair of two 32MB sticks and another pair of two 16 MB sticks totaling 96 MiB). I've also used 6,5 GiB 2,5 IDE HDD from some old laptop, that was competing in terms of noise generated with the scope itself (prior to this I've used 40G hdd, but I had issues as it was recognized as 8 GB by old Atlas III mobo.).

This configuration is even below XP minimum requirements (when it comes to CPU speed). 96 MiB of RAM is a bit low for even bare XP from 2001, lest for XP SP2 loaded with tons of Agilent bloatware. However I had no choice, as my K6-2 400 MHz based 54815 that takes SDRAM DIMM sticks decided to die, when I was trying to power it up (after not using it for some two years - but neither I used that lowly 54810 during this time).

So I restored the ghost image to the HDD, put XP setup bootstrap files on it (WinMBoardMig.zip that I got from some chasms of the internet did not help here - only turned bootlooping XP installation into hanging one - just after it loaded everything and switched to 32-bit protected mode), then I did repair install of provided WinXP SP2 (it is in WinXPFiles directory or something like that).

The good thing is that I had no unrecognised/unknown devices in device manager. Now the bad.

After reboot, I've installed latest version (5.71) of scope software ... which crashed on some SSE instruction (well, it was intended for those PIII based boards it seems...). a4sse, a sse emulator, BSOD'ed right after executing provided exe file.

As I imagined that rewritting scope app to not use SSE might be a major task on its own, I've tried the oldest scope app from Keysights website (4.21) which only barked that "Low physical memory detected.  Check physical memory size in the control panel and reboot", then caused some driver to allocate 1 GiB of memory (mostly in pagefile...) and hung afterwards.

After noping out that memory error it had shown another one: "The scope vxd is not registered or is out of date." - lol, they didn't updated that string for XP version. And it looked like it is not working anyway (all self tests failed, unable to calibrate, togle LEDs, read knobs etc).

I've decided to try Win'95 scope app instead, since it was destined for my scope and certainly it shouldn't expect it to be 5483x instead, hoping that interface between the driver and scope app didn't changed in the meantime.

(Both scope apps, after a quick look, seems to share their codebase.)

Win'95 app used file "\\.\hp548xx.vxd" to communicate with the acq board driver, whereas the XP one used "\\.\Scope0" instead. So I hexedited w'95 HP5481X.EXE accordingly, only to discover that it is working just like XP one (albeit with no message about wrong vxd and not eating 1 GiB of RAM). It couldn't read my scope s/n, was detecting it as 54855, couldn't find calibration data (despite it being where it should be) and of course no communication with front panel controls. Should I also say it didn't measured anything?

After a reboot to w'95 it turned out that on w'95 directly launching HP5481X.EXE produces the exact same result as directly launching it under XP. It turned out that on Windows 95 another exe is launched first - hp548Ldr.exe - which apparently tried to establish scope type and then launch either HP5481X.EXE or HP5484X.EXE with some magic parameters.

hp548Ldr.exe had at least one bug in it - if it failed to open file exposed by acq board driver, it didn't send IOCTL and didn't initialise some variable, but afterwards it tries to access memory pointed by that variable, like that not placed IOCTL call was successfull. So it crashed on XP, since it apparently failed to open that \\.\Scope0.

I've downloaded a little utility by the name of "DosDeviceInspector" to see if there is really \\.\Scope0 device (or maybe other devices of interest). Of course it also crashed on SSE instruction (file is dated 2016-01-12, so probably they used compiler recent enough to enable SSE by default). The instruction seemed to be irrelevant to the function of the program, as noping it out was enough to make it working and make sure that indeed, there is device called \\.\Scope0. Also there's another device of interest - \\.\Tombstone0 ("Tombstone" seems to be code name/nickname of first version of acq board - VEN_103C&DEV_1020 - thus tstone.inf/tstone.sys pair). However this device couldn't be opened on Windows XP by hp548Ldr.exe as well.

Having issues getting hp548Ldr.exe to work, I've tried to figure out whether it is really important, looking like just a launcher for either HP5481X.EXE or HP5484X.EXE.

The magic done by hp548Ldr.exe takes a form of some magic spellparameters which turned out to be:

Code: [Select]

HP5481X.EXE /scope /hpibWhen launched this way, scope software just works - on win'95 of course.

Equiped with magic parameters, I've swapped HDDs to boot Win XP and try starting scope app new way.

It turned out to be a mess - now it started crashing with unprivileged instruction. W'95 app was writing directly to registers of (I suppose) graphic card! I've tried noping the entire function that did ins and outs but then it started to crash in other places.

This time I gave up. Maybe I will try something more in the future, preferably after fixing my other scope (MOBO not working - no sign of life, I've even tried running it off external power supply; but that a good sign anyway as it is easier and probably cheaper to get equivalent AT MOBO, if I couldn't fix this one). Doing anything on that low-end XP machine is an exercise in patience (if not in futility)  - even turning it on (or off) takes several minutes. Imagine running scope app under the debugger...

Hypothesis: in that particular configuration XP driver does not work. Maybe there were different VEN_103C&DEV_1020 (with different interface to the PC I mean, as there were PCB revisions anyway, as cards from 54810 & 54815 looks different) and the XP driver was tailored only to the acq card that was shipped in XP scopes, or maybe the drivers are checking for certain characteristic of VP22 motherboard (unlikely, since folks have changed their MOBOs - but maybe tstone.sys checks for that, where drivers for newer acq boards don't?). I can also imagine different revisions of acq board firmware. Or maybe something is misconfigured (for example some service occupies the driver and latest scope knows how to deal with it, while older ones do not). Or my repair reinstallation had broken something important.

There are plenty of debug strings in at least Mesa.sys. Printing them via DbgPrint seems to depend on a value of some variable. I've tried changing it to expected 2 in driver binary, but no luck, maybe I misread something.

Or maybe I'm missing something major. Just before writing this post I believed that tstone/tombstone is a codename for acq board. But in tstone.inf file it is described as "Infiniium Display" which does not seem to make much sense for me (also I vaguely remember something about some PCI-PCI bridges? maybe "tombstone" acq card is just an one piece needed in case of later scopes, whereas on previous generations it was the only one?). Maybe there were some major changes between Win9x based Infiniiums and XP based one, despite retaining the same VEN/DEV of acq board?

Update: For explanation, why it failed, see my latest post here.

[alpher]

Well, very interesting stuff, could you send us the link to these images ?
I'll be willing to try them on a i810 board with  P3 cpu that most certainly has the required sse and I have more than enough of sdram sticks for xp to run comfortably.
If only the damn board ever decides to show up.


p.s. Dobra robota panie Krzysztofie.

[Krzys]

Well, very interesting stuff, could you send us the link to these images ?

Here's the link to said ftp dump:

https://archive.org/download/ftp.keysight.com/2015.03.ftp.keysight.com.tar/

recovery .GHO is divided into 4 CDs, so we need the following 4 ISO files: M815G-T3A-Disk1.iso, M815G-T3A-Disk2.iso, M815G-T3A-Disk3.iso and M815G-T3A-Disk4.iso.

Some files from the same directory: 54830-97013.pdf, Mesa-BIOS-HowTO.DOC, VP22.pdf, VP22AG09.zip.

ISO of CD that makes recovery HDD image from fully installed scope: makeimage11.iso

Here's main archive.org page for that download: https://archive.org/details/ftp.keysight.com (in case somebody wanted to download the whole 183 GiB tar file).

If booting recovery CD wouldn't let you install it, you could just use ghost to restore these .gho files. In my case I've used ghost32.exe (Norton Ghost 8.0.0.984 from 2003) under WinPE, after collecting all .gho files in one directory.

I'll be willing to try them on a i810 board with  P3 cpu that most certainly has the required sse and I have more than enough of sdram sticks for xp to run comfortably.

Sure it has SSE, but I guess that the issue lies elsewhere anyway. Though I wish you luck with it :)

If only the damn board ever decides to show up.


p.s. Dobra robota panie Krzysztofie.

Well, thanks, though I don't think I achieved anything - quite the contrary. But maybe someone else will eventually do it.

[alpher]

Well, my 810 motherboard just showed up, been fighting with it since very morning.
As usual when a few faults combine, it takes some serious time.
Had a flaky ide cable, flaky CF card, bad cf to ide adapter, don't ask.
Now it's a quarter to 10pm and I finally got it to boot reliably from the CD drive, got the proper CF card etc, just to find out that the copy of 5484xB recovery image from Tonys drive is corrupt.
Downloaded it twice, burned trice tried a couple of different drives and, nada:


Any help here guys?

[Tony_G]

Sorry to hear about that image being corrupt. Unfortunately I never used that as I had a 54845A and not the B. I used the images in the 3_5, 4_3 & 4_5 folders. Did you try them?

TonyG

[alpher]

I wanted to try the B version because I'm hoping that the "B" hardware may be closer to my new "upgraded to socket 370 P3" than the original socket 7 system was.
Problem solved itself this morning though, I've found a good version here:
https://archive.org/download/ftp.keysight.com/2015.03.ftp.keysight.com.tar/ftp.keysight.com%2Fcos%2Foutbound%2F54845B%2F54846B%20Recovery%20CD%204.50%2FPholyRecovery.iso

Now trying the install, we'll see how it goes.
So far I'm getting windows protection errors after second reboot.
BTW. same thing happened with the image that Converter send me.

[alpher]

Still no go, after almost 2 full days I wasn't able to successfully install any of the scope images on the new motherboard.
Tried almost every combination in the BIOS settings, disabled cpu cache, forced IDE to PIO only, etc.
No matter what I do it always errors out at the same spot.
Now, to be sure that the hardware works with windows 98 I've installed both the first and the second edition on the very hardware that the scope must work with, no major problems.
Here is a screenshot of the device manager of the W98FE (that's the one that scope is based on, I think?), showing what needs the driver installed.
Despite that windows installs and runs fine.:
 

Now getting to the scope recovery images, I've tried both, mostly the 54845B image downloaded from archive.org, tried also the original 4.3 version from Tony's drive that worked for me before (on original socket 7 motherboard).
They fail everytime  I tried.
The sequence is as follows:















After that the scope locks up, and I have to power cycle.
Unfortunately after restart all I get is windows protection error.
Desperately need a second opinion here.
 

[tautech]

Desperately need a second opinion here.
 

NEVER let Windows decide what it thinks is the right driver for anything !

Get the correct drivers from the HW manufacturer always.
For some old HW you will have to dive into some archives probably.
Good luck.

[nctnico]

You'll need to get the Win95 drivers from the original disk. Letting Windows select the acquisition hardware drivers isn't going to work.

[alpher]

The thing is that I'm using the original HP/Agilent recovery images that have to have the proper drivers etc.
Would be really nice if someone with a real 54845B could look inside and tell what is the actual chipset that the motherboard  is based on.
I know that the original 54845A is a socket 7  system , can be VIA , Intel HX and possibly others.

[tautech]

The thing is that I'm using the original HP/Agilent recovery images that have to have the proper drivers etc.
Would be really nice if someone with a real 54845B could look inside and tell what is the actual chipset that the motherboard  is based on.
I know that the original 54845A is a socket 7  system , can be VIA , Intel HX and possibly others.

Doesn't matter what the HW is it still needs the right drivers.
Treat this stage like you would for building a custom PC and get the correct driver for each piece of HW and NOT from the first source you find online but from the HW maker.
Only resort to other online sources if the manufacturer doesn't have the driver (or driver package) available for download. (unlikely)

[alpher]

I don't think that you grasp the problem at hand here, there is not a driver or software package available for these scopes.
All you have are a couple of recovery images that include the OS (windows 98 first edition most likely on the 54845B ,for sure on 54845A) plus the necessary drivers plus custom scope application, that is. There's no more AFAIK ?.

[tautech]

I don't think that you grasp the problem at hand here, there is not a driver or software package available for these scopes.

Oh yes I certainly do.
It's a PC first running scope SW. Any scope running Windows should be thought of like this.

Get the PC bit right and the rest will fall into line.
Have a squiz through this thread and it may open your eyes:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/upgrading-mainboard-in-lecroy-dda-3000-(aka-wavepro-7300a)/

Just trying to help. 

[alpher]

I've read the first page, will keep reading for the sake of it, but have a distinct feeling of wasting my time there.
At first glance , apples and very old oranges.
We're talking windows 98 (first edition) versus upgrading P4 to a dual core or more.

[nctnico]

I don't think that you grasp the problem at hand here, there is not a driver or software package available for these scopes.

Oh yes I certainly do.
It's a PC first running scope SW. Any scope running Windows should be though of like this.

Get the PC bit right and the rest will fall into line.

Yes and no. Getting the PC part up and running to the point where it boots Windows properly is step one. Step two is to get the equipment specific drivers installed. If you have an original disk then it should be possible to get the right inf file and .sys files from it. If you are lucky these are in a seperate directory together with the software. If you are unlucky you have to take these from the inf and system32 directories under the WIndows installation directory. Not undoable but it takes some skills on dealing with how Windows is structured.

And even then there may be less obvious parts of the software. The route I have taken with my 54835A is to make a backup of the original disk and use the official software updates to get to the latest software version. I didn't re-install Windows 98.

[alpher]

I've noticed that if you just keep cancelling all the "found Hardware " wizards you can sail almost to the end of install, unfortunately at the ens the same BSOD awaits, so who knows you may have to install one of the drivers along the way, will keep playing.

[alpher]

I don't think that you grasp the problem at hand here, there is not a driver or software package available for these scopes.

Oh yes I certainly do.
It's a PC first running scope SW. Any scope running Windows should be though of like this.

Get the PC bit right and the rest will fall into line.

Yes and no. Getting the PC part up and running to the point where it boots Windows properly is step one. Step two is to get the equipment specific drivers installed. If you have an original disk then it should be possible to get the right inf file and .sys files from it. If you are lucky these are in a seperate directory together with the software. If you are unlucky you have to take these from the inf and system32 directories under the WIndows installation directory. Not undoable but it takes some skills on dealing with how Windows is structured.

And even then there may be less obvious parts of the software. The route I have taken with my 54835A is to make a backup of the original disk and use the official software updates to get to the latest software version. I didn't re-install Windows 98.

Actually, no and no may be closer to the truth.
The way I see it HP/Agilent runs the scope application from a ramdisk, that  is being setup at bottime. They even mention something about it in the instruction manual, to the occasion that you can just turn the power off to the scope without worrying about a normal windows shutdown procedure. Plus that  the windows itself doesn't require normal serial number input , indicates that the windows install was rather highly customized on these scopes, hence no application install files, no drivers, etc.

[Converter]

The thing is that I'm using the original HP/Agilent recovery images that have to have the proper drivers etc.

Yes, there are drivers, but you do not know where they are and how they are called. The system does not know this either and installs standard non-proprietary drivers with a newer date.
You were correctly told - you should not allow Windows to choose drivers.
Windows prefers drivers that are often incompatible with special hardware. The drivers you need, often do not have compatibility data. You must manually point to them. During the installation process, you should not have chosen "automatic installation", but rather specify the location of the necessary ".inf".
Sometimes it is useful to even completely remove the driver from the system, which Windows tries to install automatically so that it does not interfere with the installation of your driver.

I extracted all the drivers from the running 54845B system. Download them from the link and update each of them by force:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/17D6171w5FhPHHetg21qx1XyKgS37PN_P/view?usp=sharing

In addition, you will most likely have to independently find on the Internet and install the drivers necessary for your new set of i810 motherboard chipsets (which are not in my set).


Try this:
Choose the PCI video adapter as the first one in the BIOS and it is advisable to disable the video processor integrated on the motherboard.
After installing the disk image do not agree to auto-install drivers.
First, download and install the drivers for your motherboard manufacturer for y set i810 chipsets.
Then manually install the "Chips & Technologies 65550 PCI" video adapter driver by specifying the path to the .inf in the appropriate folder in my set.
After that, manually install the latest driver from my folder for the "548XX Scope Interface".
Reboot after each step.

[charlyd]

why not install Windows XP (32) on that scope... and then copy over all software needed and if i am right there is a Windows xp version of this scope so drivers and scope software should run...
or is this cutting the edges too much?  i don t know what motherboard you have exactly. or did i miss that way back ;-)

keep on following you...

[Krzys]

why not install Windows XP (32) on that scope... and then crry over all software needed and if i am right there is a Windows xp version of this scope so drivers and scope software should run...

No version of 54845 came with factory pre-installed XP from Agilent, as far as I know.

I guess that alpher struggles to get working scope with his new mobo first - just like he had it working with factory mobo - then maybe he would do some more experiments with XP, which might prove unsuccessful (based on my attempts). If I were him, I would do the same.

Drivers from Windows 98 based Infiniiums won't work in XP as these were old style .vxd drivers (not WDM). Scope software that was in factory configuration in this scope won't work too (it messes around with I/O ports of C&T 65550 graphics card, something palette-related I think).

While there are drivers for acq board in 54845 for XP and there are newer versions of scope software that do run in XP (codebase carried over from Win 9x scopes), both were meant for 54831/54832 scopes (or possibly some others that I've missed), which were newer than 54845.

For more details on trying to run XP on first infiniium (lowly 54810), see my post here.
Update: And for explanation, why it failed, see my latest post here.

[Converter]

I did everything that you wrote over a year ago. I even at some point achieved that the Agilent oscilloscope application in Windows XP 54845 starts up successfully (it incorrectly identifies the device model), and there are no visible errors in the device manager. But the original drivers do not work in Win XP, and the drivers from 54830/54831 do not support this ACQ board. If someone does not make a modification of the original drivers 54845 (15, 25,35) to support Win XP, the success did not reach, IMHO.

[Tony_G]

Drivers from Windows 98 won't work in XP as these were old style .vxd drivers (not WDM).

This is correct but I should point out that WDM was introduced in Win98 so if HPAK wrote WDM drivers for Win98 there is a chance that they might work. VxD certainly not though as Krzys pointed out.

TonyG

[Krzys]

Drivers from Windows 98 won't work in XP as these were old style .vxd drivers (not WDM).

This is correct but I should point out that WDM was introduced in Win98 so if HPAK wrote WDM drivers for Win98 there is a chance that they might work. VxD certainly not though as Krzys pointed out.

TonyG

In all Win 9x-based scopes I've seen VxD drivers, .sys driver files only on XP-based scopes. I think that I looked into all versions available in usual places, before I discovered set of XP recovery ISOs.

But well, that gives me another idea to try - taking let's say tstone.sys from XP based scope and trying to run it in Windows 98, with correct 54810/15/25/35/45/46 win 9x app - to see, if the driver itself works with old (codename "Tombstone") board. Of course all that provided the XP-sourced driver would work in Windows 98 (and it is real WDM driver, not the old-style kernel-mode NT .sys). This could be both tricky (as alpher's case demonstrated, where he is trying to make it just working, such extravagant experiments for now) and unconclusive (if it wouldn't work).

[Krzys]

I've found, why my efforts on getting Windows XP on 54810 were doomed to failure... 

... in this very thread ... 

Before anyone starts talking WinXP on the 54810A series. 
The 54830/31/32A/D used 1GHz or 1.2 GHZ Pentium III processors on a newer platform without ISA slots. They did use the same C&T graphics driver chip, though. However, the ACQ controller is newer (In fact the older ACQ controller from the 54810A series is present but only used for power on functions, front panel control, and the scope's video frame buffer) I think upgrading to XP would be a problem as the driver for the ACQ controller would not want to talk to the old ACQ board.

EDIT: And I don't think the pin-out for the ribbon cable is the same anyway...

EDIT2: which wouldn't matter anyway. Duh. You'd have to find an XP driver for the OLD controller.

The picture shows the newer ACQ controller in red, the old one in blue

If one could find a newer motherboard (just to upgrade the hardware for performance) with an ISA slot (For GPIB functionality) it just might work.

According to the post cited above, Tombstone board (old acq board interface card that is in 54810) was delegated to handling I/O and C&T graphics in XP based scopes (5483x) (edit: according to service manual, I/O was connected to new board, old board was connected to display only - and nothing else - which makes no sense to me whatsoever, from what it got data to display? from Windows scope app!?). Scope was connected to another board.

So its no surprise that Windows XP tstone.sys is not enough for running XP on 5481x/2x/35/4x...

No surprise that opening \\.\Scope0 failed... On the other hand opening \\.\Tombstone0 failed as well... (I think that I've tried it at least once, but now I'm not sure).

I don't know how could I've missed that post on the first page. I guess I never enlarged that thumbnail, as I don't remember this image.

Prior to this latest ehm... discovery, I've got an impression, that there were two distinct ACQ boards interface cards used in 54830/1/2/3 scopes - the original one that was carried over from 5481x/2x/35/4x, present in Win'98 based 54830/1/2/3 and newer one present in XP-based 54830/1/2/3. According to my impression, factory XP image in 54830/1/2/3 had only drivers for newer acq board interface card, while mythical XP upgrade kit that fetches insane amounts of money on ebay® (N5383A Infiniium Performance Upgrade kit) provides drivers for older acq board interface card as well.

My impression formed while reading the other thread and other posts on the topic. I cannot find it right now, but somebody tried to force drivers for newer acq board interface card (VEN_15BC&DEV_050X) to the old one (VEN_103C&DEV_1020 - he had big question mark in Device Manager for that card) and had some error message from the scope software (wrong address? invalid address? don't remember).

Maybe my impressions were all wrong and all 54830/1/2/3 Infiniiums in fact have two cards, as quoted post says - old tombstone board carried over from first generation of Infiniiums, now delegated to handle I/O and display (edit: according to service manual, I/O was connected to new board, old board was connected to display only - and nothing else - which makes no sense to me whatsoever, from what it got data to display? from Windows scope app!?), and new ACQ board interface card that interfaces mobo with the scope. This makes perfect sense for me.

Or maybe I mistook ACQ board (that big thing underneath) for interface card - and there were indeed two revisions of ACQ board installed in different revisions of the scope.

Somewhat supporting the hypothesis about two ACQ boards interface cards in 54830/1/2/3 is the fact, that XP-based 54831D had tstone.sys/tstone.inf as well, as evidenced by this post. I think that mythical XP upgrade kit that fetches insane amounts of money on ebay® (N5383A Infiniium Performance Upgrade kit) is the same as recovery media for all 54830/1/2/3 scopes, used internally by HPAK. The ISO's that once were hosted on Keysight's ftp, are possibly the exact same thing (except for the fact, that XP was upgraded to SP2 here).

[Tony_G]

But well, that gives me another idea to try - taking let's say tstone.sys from XP based scope and trying to run it in Windows 98, with correct 54810/15/25/35/45/46 win 9x app - to see, if the driver itself works with old (codename "Tombstone") board. Of course all that provided the XP-sourced driver would work in Windows 98 (and it is real WDM driver, not the old-style kernel-mode NT .sys).

Unfortunately WDM was designed to be forwards compatible and not backwards compatible. It is possible for a Win98 WDM driver to work on WinXP but not necessarily the other way around. In fact I'd expect most, if not all WinXP WDM drivers to fail on Win98.

TonyG

[Mrt12]

Hi,
My scope uses the VP22 mainboard and runs Win98.
Is it possible to upgrade my hardware to XP, or do I need a new board?
Do the previously mentioned M815TG ISO files work for XP?

Thanks,
Tobias
HB9FSX

[Krzys]

Hi,
My scope uses the VP22 mainboard and runs Win98.
Is it possible to upgrade my hardware to XP, or do I need a new board?
Do the previously mentioned M815TG ISO files work for XP?

If it is 54830/1/2/3 (with two interface cards - old one for I/O and new one for scope interfacing - just like on following picture), then these ISO's should be fine. It should work out-of-the-box (remember to install scope app downloaded from Keysight website after restoring ghost image from the CDs).

Just remember to make a backup of current HDD with Win'98 - prefferably full sector-by-sector image (or use another HDD for Windows XP).

Scope updated to Windows XP will need some 256 MB of RAM - or more. With 96 MB HP/Agilent/Keysight XP install is unusable, even without scope app.

On the other hand I think that previous-generation Infiniiums (54810/15/20/35/45/55) never used VP22 motherboard.

Here are two interface cards as in XP-based 54830/1/2/3 Infiniiums:

[Mrt12]

Well, very interesting stuff, could you send us the link to these images ?

Here's the link to said ftp dump:

https://archive.org/download/ftp.keysight.com/2015.03.ftp.keysight.com.tar/

recovery .GHO is divided into 4 CDs, so we need the following 4 ISO files: M815G-T3A-Disk1.iso, M815G-T3A-Disk2.iso, M815G-T3A-Disk3.iso and M815G-T3A-Disk4.iso.

Some files from the same directory: 54830-97013.pdf, Mesa-BIOS-HowTO.DOC, VP22.pdf, VP22AG09.zip.

ISO of CD that makes recovery HDD image from fully installed scope: makeimage11.iso

Here's main archive.org page for that download: https://archive.org/details/ftp.keysight.com (in case somebody wanted to download the whole 183 GiB tar file).

If booting recovery CD wouldn't let you install it, you could just use ghost to restore these .gho files. In my case I've used ghost32.exe (Norton Ghost 8.0.0.984 from 2003) under WinPE, after collecting all .gho files in one directory.

I'll be willing to try them on a i810 board with  P3 cpu that most certainly has the required sse and I have more than enough of sdram sticks for xp to run comfortably.

Sure it has SSE, but I guess that the issue lies elsewhere anyway. Though I wish you luck with it :)

If only the damn board ever decides to show up.


p.s. Dobra robota panie Krzysztofie.

Well, thanks, though I don't think I achieved anything - quite the contrary. But maybe someone else will eventually do it.

Hi,
I downloaded the 4 ISO images and burnt them on CDs. Botting from Disk 1 works fine and the recovery starts, but it cannot read CD 2. Did you have the same problem? how did you merge the Ghost image files?

My board has 256 MB RAM installed. There are two additional spare sockets for more RAM, but I think it will be difficult to obtain SDRAM these days :-(

attached is a picture of my scope.

[gslick]

My board has 256 MB RAM installed. There are two additional spare sockets for more RAM, but I think it will be difficult to obtain SDRAM these days :-(

The memory is 168-pin DIMM PC133 SDRAM. While you might not be able to buy that new current production, you should be able to find another 256MB DIMM used for less than $10.

I don't have a VP22 motherboard. I have a similar M815-G motherboard from a 16900A which came with two MT8LSDT3264AG-133 256MB Sync 133MHz CL3 DIMMs. I currently see several of those on eBay in the US for less than $10, including shipping.

[Krzys]

Hi,
I downloaded the 4 ISO images and burnt them on CDs. Botting from Disk 1 works fine and the recovery starts, but it cannot read CD 2. Did you have the same problem? how did you merge the Ghost image files?

No, since I used no CDs to do the restore.

AFAIR I moved the HDD to some laptop, then netbooted it via PXE to WinPE, mounted shared folder with extracted content of every ISO (all *.gho files in the same directory - I didn't merged them, just placed each file in the same directory), then I've used Ghost 8.0 for Windows to restore the image to HDD.

I couldn't have used my scope to do this, since (1) it got no CD drive and I didn't wanted to needlessly burn CD or DVD, and even if I wanted to burn a CD, there was no guarantee, that HP/Agilent/Keysight blessed restore CD set would restore anything on my - totally unsupported - scope (without proper interface boards, as it turned out); (2) my scope didn't wanted to boot from network, Intel Pro 100 with (otherwise) working bootrom flashed just hung the system and realtek 8139-based card with etherboot loaded from the diskette didn't wanted to talk with my network, (3) even if I succeed in PXE booting the scope, I would have somewhat limited possibilities (I have two WinPE's in my network, one XP-based that runs off the network and got somewhat broken TCP/IP stack - it would work, but I wouldn't be able to mount network share with *.gho files from another PC with it; the other is Windows 7-based and in form of sdi image loadable to RAM, which takes 90 MB for ramdisk alone - this wouldn't work on a scope with 96 megabytes of RAM).

If there is some read error, then I see the following possibilities:

• corrupted ISO file - see md5sums of mine, at the end of this post, to make sure it is not the case
• improperly burned (failing CD recorder?)/marginal/faulty/dusty CD blank
• aging CD drive in the scope (failing laser?)
• issues with IDE cable
• issues with configuration (I remember for example that when I had only one CD-ROM on an IDE channel, configured as slave, it used to silently corrupt data read from CDs - rather small extent, but there was corruption)
• some bugs/quirks in chipset
• bad RAM/motherboard/PSU

You could kill two bird...eee points from the list above with one ston...ee with replacing CD drive with DVD one (I guess there's a plenty pata laptop drives on eBay, since this was the most popular kind until some 2009-2010 - of course provided that the scope has CD and not DVD drive by default) and preparing (and then burning) ISO containing all *.gho files (you need some software that could edit ISO files, then you need to open the first one and add all *.gho files extracted from subsequent images - you need to proceed in this way so the resultant ISO would still be bootable).

Or, alternatively, connect the HDD to another PC and use ghost for Windows.

MD5SUMs of my images:

Code: [Select]

a2285f8acc7ab82dfca1181c416855f0 *M815G-T3A-Disk1.iso
365bc80cddbaff870f0b8b7f3cc67879 *M815G-T3A-Disk2.iso
92fae25cec4fd22f60219d729a05f182 *M815G-T3A-Disk3.iso
57b2fb33104fee5925853949b611bfd5 *M815G-T3A-Disk4.iso

attached is a picture of my scope.

I see two interface cards in there, I think it should be OK.

[Mrt12]

I verified the MD5 sums. They are OK. I also tried to install Ghost in a Virtual Box, which worked fine, but is unable to restore the image because it misses some drivers, i.e. Ghost wants to reboot the PC and then misses some IDE or whatever drivers. I assume my PC hardware is too new for this old stuff to work reliably.... :-/

[Mrt12]

OK I just tried it again, I burnt CD2 again on a different PC with a different drive. No success so far, the Ghost recovery still fails when it comes to part 2, claiming that there is "corruption in the image". If I hat Ghost32.exe I could recover the Image in a VirtualBox and then copy it to the scope, but I have no idea where to get that software.

[nctnico]

Try to set the write speed to the slowest setting. CDRs written at high speed never worked for me especially when using in a different CDROM drive.

[Mrt12]

I managed to get a copy of Ghost32.exe and used that in a VirtualBox to restore the images to  a virtual disk. My next step will then be to copy the virtual disk to the scope using CloneZilla, which I know works fine because I have already used CloneZilla to make an image of the installed hard disk.

[Mrt12]

I made some small progress. Using "Hirens Boot CD" which contains some basic Windows XP PE environment and Ghost32, I was able to boot my scope. I copied all Ghost files to my NAS and was able to restore them on the scope via network, it worked almost out of the box and the speed is way faster than the recovery via CD!
The restore was successful, but it appears that there is something "Bad" which I am not sure yet. Perhaps it has to do with the partition table or so because my IDE disk is smaller than the standard disk used by agilent?

[Krzys]

I made some small progress. Using "Hirens Boot CD" which contains some basic Windows XP PE environment and Ghost32, I was able to boot my scope. I copied all Ghost files to my NAS and was able to restore them on the scope via network, it worked almost out of the box and the speed is way faster than the recovery via CD!

Great!

The restore was successful, but it appears that there is something "Bad" which I am not sure yet. Perhaps it has to do with the partition table or so because my IDE disk is smaller than the standard disk used by agilent?

Just restore standard Windows XP MBR (Master Boot Record). You could do this by booting into Windows XP recovery console and then using the command

Code: [Select]

fixmbr Any Win2k/XP/Win2k3 installation media should do, you just need to pres "R" on this screen:

Alternatively, you could boot the scope with MS-DOS floppy/CD and use the command:

Code: [Select]

fdisk /mbr
You could also try

Code: [Select]

fixboot from Windows XP Recovery Console, but I think it shouldn't matter/wouldn't help.

Windows 7 & Windows 7-based WinPE equivalent for fixmbr is said to be

Code: [Select]

bootrec.exe /fixmbr
bootsect.exe /nt60 all /force /mbrand for fixbot:

Code: [Select]

bootrec.exe /fixboot
bootsect /nt60 ALLthough I think I have never used these (I hardly remeber using fixmbr/fixboot in XP recovery console either)

Both methods should work and result in the same - restoring standard boot loader code to MBR.

If it still doesn't boot (or boots to small WinPE image on second partition), then please make sure that first partition is marked as active.
You could also install Smart Boot Manager (smbr) - ancient boot manager with menu, which will allow you to boot either XP installation or recovery image on second partition in case of some screwup (but please bear in mind that in fresh installation there is no *.gho file on the recovery partition, you need to create it as per HP/Keysight/Agilent guide - or substitute the wrapper or recovery wizard for something like Total Commander or cmd.exe).

As far as SmartBootManager is concerned, the easiest way of installing smbr for me is to write it to a floppy, boot it, select HDD (Harddisk it is called, not one of the partitions), then open menu (by pressing Tab) and use command System Settings -> Install SmartBootManager.

Stock Agilent/Keysight/HP image uses recovery partition (XP-based Infiniiums come with no installation media) which could be booted instead of the normal one by pressing some key on startup. Recovery partition contains a WinPE with a wizard that just runs ghost32.exe (via some wrappers AFAIR) that restores *.gho image made in the factory after calibration. It was claimed somewhere (AFAIR on these forums) that it uses smbr to select partition to boot, but it doesn't look like it at all for me. Anyway I guess that Agilent's MBR stores some hardcoded offset somewhere and that's why it doesn't work. It didn't worked for me either, but somehow I forgot to add such details in my previous posts.

btw. thanks for the screenshot, I think I never saw that listing from 54830/1/2/3 with the cards and PCI bridges listed in all their glory.

[charlyd]

What about installing windows xp normally on the scope and then standalone convert it to a virtual machine and from there on build a working scope enviroment which you create a acronis image from.

are all hardware drivers available or usable from xp ready machines    or is that the problem??

i keep following you guys curious about the finish...

[charlyd]

any update on this project?   is windows XP now working in the 54835A/54845A  models? with the M815-G mobo?

[analogRF]

Today I took out my HP 54845A after 2 or 3 month sitting in the corner to do some measurements and comparison with my LC584. But the scope
keeps randomly rebooting itself  Sometimes right after I turn it on before windows 98 starts and sometimes it work for 10-15 minutes doing all sorts of stuff but it just shuts down and restarts. It was working fine the last time I used it.

It's an old HP brand with AMI motherboard 757 rev C and its original AMD CPU. I had replaced the HDD with Compact flash card sitting right on top of the IDE connector on the board (with adapter of course) and it has 4x64MB RAM which I know its way overkill. No other upgrades. but it was fine before I put it away.

what do you think could be wrong? I have been dicking around with reseating PCI and ISA cards and RAM sticks but it keeps rebooting randomly. I don't think it is heat related because sometimes it happens right after cold boot before even win98 starts.

[nctnico]

Perhaps some electrolytic capacitors turned bad.

[analogRF]

Perhaps some electrolytic capacitors turned bad.

That was also my suspicion but where...it's been sitting on the corner for 2 or 3 month only. caps on the motherboard at least look ok ...PSU voltages are all good too...

[Converter]

The most perishable product is aluminum capacitors with liquid electrolyte. Check the voltages stability from the power supply using a different oscilloscope in roll mode. Make sure that the ripple is normal. Some contacts may also oxidize, especially if you store it in a humid environment. Check connectors.
Check if a forced shutdown signal is received from the oscilloscope control circuit, or the protection in the power supply unit is activated against overcurrent, temperature, or a signal from the supervisor for voltage.

[Jwalling]

what do you think could be wrong? I have been dicking around with reseating PCI and ISA cards and RAM sticks but it keeps rebooting randomly. I don't think it is heat related because sometimes it happens right after cold boot before even win98 starts.

Try running memtest86+ on it.

[analogRF]

First of all my own 54845A which was randomly rebooting seems to be working fine again...I ran memtst86 for an hour and it didn't find any error. I had cleaned up all the board edges, connectors, etc...and I checked all the main filter capacitors on the PSU and on the mobo and they were all very good even better than the brand new ones I was going to replaced them with! (they were very good both in terms of ESR and value)
but after playing with it for a couple of days and keeping it running eventually the reboot problem went away and it has been working 1-2 hours at time for a while now. Maybe there is a bad cap somewhere that was about to die when the unit was stored for a couple of month and now that it has seen voltage across it, it has come back to life (and it will probably die again) but I don't know where that could be...I suspect one of the caps in the PSU but not in  the output filters, perhaps on that control daughter board which is soldered on to the main PSU board...

However, I am now dealing with another 54845A which is not mine. Belongs to a colleague who is not into repairing stuff although he does a lot of electronics specially RF...This is a VIN 033 model made around 2000 with FIC VA-503A motherboard (newer than mine) with one stick of 64MB SRAM and K6/400 CPU. Based on his description the unit had been working until the day that it was put aside about 5-6 month ago and now it does not boot. It stops at "Verifying DMI pool data ...." and nothing after that. Recognizes the HDD and I have checked the HDD outside the unit with chkdsk /r and no errors. I also connected the original HDD of my own older unit to it just to see if it boots.
There were tons of leaky bulged elcos on the motherboard which I replaced them all (all the 1000uF and the three 220uF and only 2 of the many 10uF but not all of them. The 10uF caps are not bulged or anything) but nothing changed...I tried to boot it with only the HDD, interface board and the video board and still a no go....tried different SRAM sticks...

any idea what else I should be looking for? All voltages on PSU are accurate and I have cleaned all the connectors...changed cmos battery and played with cmos many times...tried to boot it froma DOS floppy in the LS120 zip drive but still the same issue...

I am out of ideas now....

EDIT: any help is appreciated. I know there are people on this thread that have worked on these infinium series a lot more

[analogRF]

any ideas?
nctnico, I am counting on you 

[nctnico]

any ideas?
nctnico, I am counting on you 

It beats me. I'd try to take all the cards from the motherboard and use a standard PCI videocard to see if the problem is in there. Perhaps try to connect a speaker to the motherboard and check for beeps. There are also diagnostic cards which you can plug into a slot but I never used these.

One thing you could do is take the battery from the motherboard, short the battery terminals to make sure the CMOS memory is powered down fully. There may be a jumper on the motherboard for this purpose.

[analogRF]

i dont have a video card but I just took the CF card and adapter that I had put in my own unit (and of course it is working) into this unit
to replace its hard drive. NO change  the BIOS recognizes the CF card and reports its size and everything though

Actually that little CF card IDE adapter has a data LED on it that flashes when there is access to the CF card and it flashes when bios is detecting the IDE devices. However I noticed that after that "Verifying DMI pool data..." when the win98 should start, there is no access to the CF card at all
unless it flashes for like a few micro seconds that I cannot see but I don't think so, it appears that it never tries to access it really. It seems the BIOS gets lost at that point...is it possible that the BIOS chip is gone bad somehow after sitting idly by for a few month? 

[2N3055]

Remove battery and try booting (without it). On some old PC motherboards empty battery would prevent boot. It would behave exactly like that.
Of course, there is a chance of corrupted BIOS...

[analogRF]

battery is brand new...i have reset CMOS 100 times even shorting the battery holder pins

but the unit had been working until few month ago and after that it was sitting in the corner of his workshop (I had seen it in his workshop myself when it was working and also when it was put aside) how the bios could get corrupted? and exactly at that point when it is supposed to load the OS. everything before that takes place as it should

By the way, I notice that in the device table, it shows an unknown device (which I suppose is the interface board) and its IRQ is NA? everything else has a name and proper IRQ number. Is that normal?

EDIT: my mistake, the interface board has IRQ=10 and the display board has no IRQ number and that is exactly how it is on my own working unit. Still stuck at Verifying DMI pool data....I am out of ideas pretty much except maybe programming the BIOS chip?!  but why? and with what BIOS file? the one in the chip does not seem to exist anywhere on internet...

[analogRF]

connected a speaker to the mobo, there are no beeps until right after the "Verifying DMI pool data...." and I get one short beep
and then nothing.

shouldn't there be any beep earlier like after or before RAM test or right after recognizing IDE devices?

[nctnico]

Can you check whether the disk drive is working? Suddenly I recall I had a mysterious boot problem when I disconnected it in my scope. It is a long shot but worth trying.

[analogRF]

Can you check whether the disk drive is working? Suddenly I recall I had a mysterious boot problem when I disconnected it in my scope. It is a long shot but worth trying.

I tried 3 different disk drives including the one from my own working 54845A. I also tried the HDD of the faulty unit on my 54845 and it boots
I tried booting from floppy to DOS but it seems that it just does not access the boot device at all 

have tried different RAM sticks in different slots...all PSU voltages are good...

"Verifying DMI pool data...." and one short beep 

[nctnico]

Did you Google yet?

I have found this:
https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/stuck-at-verifying-dmi-pool-data.501230/

It seems to have something to do with the boot device order.

[analogRF]

yeah, I have been googling this thing for several days...i have seen that page,  too...have tried pretty much all their "solutions" ...

these people usually have done something to their system and then it failed to boot or they built a new system

the thing that is most irritating is that this unit had been booting fine before it was set aside for a few month and now it doesn't boot
nothing has happened to it during this time...

I am gonna clean the connectors for the 3rd time again and also move over the video card and interface board one slot (or 2 slots if possible)

I also tried another video card that I had for these scopes by the way, no luck. I do have another interface board but it is an older
model and the ribbon connector (that goes to the acq board) does not fit...but what the hell can be wrong with that board anyway?

I cannot even boot it from floppy to DOS. I will try to find a regular floppy drive (instead of the LS120) and try with that and see what happens
I must have one laying around somewhere....

EDIT: I have also moved the HDD to the secondary IDE channels just for the heck of it....of course the boot device and boot sequence in BIOS have been checked and re-checked 100 times...

[AJ3G]

Hello:

I am not sure if you are the same person, but I spoke to someone on the HP board regarding an almost identical problem. I too had the error you speak of, and it was resolved by replacing the HDD. I pulled the old mechanical drive for a solid state drive.

Your next step seems like a good one. I had a SRAM fault, which was intermittent. It seemed to work fine for about 1/2 hour and then the display would go on the fritz, followed by the SRAM error and some really weird relay contact counts. I finally took the scope completely apart, cleaned all the connectors, and card edges, and the the scope is functioning again. I have had it running now for three days without issue, so I hope the issue is corrosion on one of the connectors.

These scopes seem to be a bit finicky. I hope this helps..

Rich

[analogRF]

yes I am the same person 
but if you read my posts, I have already gone through all those things more than once...
playing around with RAM sticks and their place, using multiple known good hard drives and flash card drive, cleaning all boards and connectors 2-3 times....but what the hell, i;ll do that again 

[nctnico]

Maybe the CPU got bad. Does the heatsink fit properly?

[analogRF]

Maybe the CPU got bad. Does the heatsink fit properly?

the cpu is stuck to its fan as you may have noticed yourself since you had the same model, and yes it fits properly. it is barely warm...
why would the cpu die on its own sitting in the corner? besides i would imagine the bios would complain if the cpu was bad...
during capacitor replacements I took it out just to be safe.

[AJ3G]

That is annoying. It would seem to me if the final attempt at cleaning does not resolve the issue, the Motherboard maybe malfunctioning and need to be replaced. Not great news, but not the end of the world either.

[analogRF]

that crappy motherboard costs a lot of money these days so i doubt he will want to buy a motherboard for it...when it didnt boot, he was going to sell it as is, i convinced him that i can repair it and it must be a piece of cake and here we are   

My gut tells me it must be a very simple thing that I am overlooking...

if push comes to shove, I am going to program a new BIOS chip with one of the BIOS files on the FIC ftp server and see what happens

anybody knows what is the BIOS EPROM model? it has a sticker on it I dont wanna remove for now...

[AJ3G]

I forget where, but I thought there was some online documentation suggesting that other boards may be used, but the chassis would have to be modified (i.e. drill new holes). Yes, I agree buying the same motherboard would be expensive, but using an alternate would not, provided you were willing to make some modifications to the sub chassis.

I do not know the BIOS EPROM Model off the top of my head. Later today I can take a look if you like.

[nctnico]

Let's do a recap:
- Original problem is that it is stuck at 'verifying DMI pool data' and this didn't change. So nothing you did made the problem better or worse.
- Getting stuck at this point hints towards a BIOS / boot problem problem but it could be anything.
- All the contacts have been cleaned (I assume including the configuration jumpers) so let's rule out a contact problem.

Perhaps you need to replace more capacitors. I assume you have used low-ESR types from a reputable source to do the replacements earlier.

[analogRF]

yes, your recap is spot on. Configuration is done by microswitches which I sprayed IPO and switched them several times (even number of times!) and yes made sure they are exactly where they were before and match the 54845 service manual , so are the BIOS settings

I have replaced all 1000uF and 220uF caps (all with high quality brand new Nichicon and Panasonic) those were the bulging caps and most of them part of dc-dc converters

then there are like 20-25 tiny 10uF bypass caps all over the place which I randomly chose 2-3 of them and replaced

but taking the caps out of this multilayer board is really a nightmare. 10uFs were not that bad although not as good as the new ones i installed
maybe there are a few of them somewhere that are really bad? but they dont seem to be that huge of a deal that can cause such problem

i can try to replace more of them if you guys really think that could help

[nctnico]

Did you use hot-air during removal and fitting of the capacitors? In my experience this is the only way to get a capacitor replaced on a PC motherboard.

[Converter]

I don’t understand why you suffer so much time? This motherboard today is not worth $5. Do you have problems to buy another standard PC motherboard format Baby-AT with a processor socket even a little newer (for Pentium III) than you have now? See my posts:

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/agilent-54835a-scope-(4-channel-1ghz-4gss)-repair-uphack/msg1407288/#msg1407288
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/agilent-54835a-scope-(4-channel-1ghz-4gss)-repair-uphack/msg1385418/#msg1385418
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/agilent-54835a-scope-(4-channel-1ghz-4gss)-repair-uphack/msg1346487/#msg1346487

[nctnico]

That is also an option; I forgot about that. IMHO the FIC motherboard never was a high quality choice.

[analogRF]

no, just my hakko iron and lots of flux and solder wick after that
it takes a lot of time but does the job...

[analogRF]

That is also an option; I forgot about that. IMHO the FIC motherboard never was a high quality choice.

yes these are really a POS. I am surprised why Agilent chose to put these into their highest end scopes at the time
these are not industrial grade board, not even a consumer grade, just garbage...

[analogRF]

I don’t understand why you suffer so much time? This motherboard today is not worth $5. Do you have problems to buy another standard PC motherboard format Baby-AT with a processor socket even a little newer (for Pentium III) than you have now? See my posts:

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/agilent-54835a-scope-(4-channel-1ghz-4gss)-repair-uphack/msg1407288/#msg1407288
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/agilent-54835a-scope-(4-channel-1ghz-4gss)-repair-uphack/msg1385418/#msg1385418
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/agilent-54835a-scope-(4-channel-1ghz-4gss)-repair-uphack/msg1346487/#msg1346487

the scope is not mine so I have to check with the owner but certainly he does not want to alter the back panel and drill holes and stuff...
so if there is a board that perfectly replaces this POS and is cheap then yeah, I think he will consider it.

[Converter]

the scope is not mine so I have to check with the owner but certainly he does not want to alter the back panel and drill holes and stuff...
so if there is a board that perfectly replaces this POS and is cheap then yeah, I think he will consider it.

Perhaps you did not attach importance, but the keyword in my post was "Baby-AT".

[Converter]

Some links for you that may be helpful (Baby-AT + Socket 370):

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Socket-370-motherboard-Procomp-BIW2B-Intel-810-All-cables-TESTED/254146901174
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Motherboard-Procomp-BIW2B-COMBO-SLOT-1-Socket-370-Intel-i810/123947801384
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Polaris-VIA-370-PGA-370-motherboard-ISA-bus/323966242757
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Socket-370-motherboard-PcPartner-VIB861S-APBS3-C861-VIA-Apollo-Pro-TESTED/254255887971
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Socket-370-motherboard-Soltek-SL63A1-i440ZX-TESTED/254416633699
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Bundle-of-Motherboards-5x-socket-370-3x-socket-5-2x-slot1-1x/303353323253
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Motherboard-ZIDA-Tomato-Board-ZX98-CT-Socket-370-with-Celeron-533MHz/223467539361
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-Motherboard-PC-Dual-SLOT1-S370-Procomp-BIW2B-AT/333298782987

Most importantly, you can use Pentium III with them, which works much faster than your processor on the Socket 7.
I recommend choosing with the i810 chipset, since this will allow you to get IDE Ultra DMA4-66 (and not only DMA2-33), which will speed up loading with good HDD or SSD.

[analogRF]

alright, let me see, I cleaned up all the boards and connectors everywhere thoroughly again, reset the CMOS and then set it up according to page 5-48 of the Agilent service manual like before, changed the RAM, etc, replaced a few more of the 10uF caps...and again no luck 
I could not move the PCI cards around because they hit the cpu heatsink.

I am sure the BIOS does not even attempt to access the boot record on the booting device whether it is floppy or HDD or CD (I connected a cr rom to the ide channel to check). Something else is stopping it before booting the OS. Based on my past experience when I used to build PCs about 17-18 years ago, this is usually due to a HW conflict of some sort which leads me to believe the BIOS settings are not right even though I followed the Agilent service manual (load Setup Defaults, then....)

Can somebody who has this board (FIC VA-503A) please check the bios settings and post a couple of pictures so I can compare? specially the second page which is called BIOS features and the one that is called chipset features and also Integrated Peripherals.

I have played many times with bios settings but only those that were related to IDE or booting or PCI devices, not the others because I thought setting them up based on agilent service manual should be enough.

[nctnico]

I guess you already tried to set the BIOS settings to 'defaults'?

[analogRF]

I guess you already tried to set the BIOS settings to 'defaults'?

yes, as per instruction in agilent service manual, it starts by setting to default and then it shows some of the settings that must be specifically set
but they are actually set already by default. you can look it up in the service manual

[analogRF]

I am worried that maybe because of the bulging leaky dead caps when the instrument first powered on (after several month of inactivity)
maybe one of the devices/chips on the board could not tolerate the surge or ripple of whatever and died...i don't think it is the cpu and i am sure it was not he memory stick but other chips...just a bad thought 

[nctnico]

If any of the electrolyte got spilled on the board then it may create a short(ish) or have eaten away a trace. IMHO you are probably better of by installing a new motherboard as Converter has suggested. You have already tried every 'simple' solution.

[Alfons]

If the BIOS is set to default, the device boots in any case. After the Cmos battery was empty on my board, the bios was also on default settings. I just had to set the time. The fact, that the device did not boot is not due to the bios settings, but probably because the IDE controller has a defect (if the hard disk is OK).

[analogRF]

If any of the electrolytic got spilled on the board then it may create a short(ish) or have eaten away a trace. IMHO you are probably better of by installing a new motherboard as Converter has suggested. You have already tried every 'simple' solution.

luckily there was no spillage on the board at all, the caps had leaked from the top of their head 

yeah I am looking at those baby AT boards, the thing is that he does not want anything changed at the back of the scope
so all the cards must sit in the same positions as they are now. By looking at the pictures of these boards I cannot
say which one would allow this


EDIT: stil pictures of the bios settings is appreciated

[charlyd]

does the board ramdomly reboot?    i mean if you pull all cards and power on the mainboard does it post or even then reboot?  you can try with a seperate PSU

[alpher]

OK. So I sort of resurrected my 54845A project, managed to install new motherboard and bring the system back from the dead. Unfortunately wasn't able to install the 4.5B version of software  .
Anyway back to the 4.3A we go, up and running (was running uppgraded to 4.5 to).
There is a problem though, while before the scope passed all the self tests without any issues, also the calibration went through multiple times succefully, now it somehow developed "logic trigger" faults in all 4 channels during the cal process.
Self test fails on "logic trigger" and "pattern trigger".
So began to readup on the contents of HPX4S help file that someone suggested as good source to start board level troubleshooting.
Attached are pdf versions of the relevant sections from that help file, attached here because somehow microsoft made them really difficult to open in windows 10  .

The only immediately usefull info I foun there is as follws:
"
Error Symptom   Diagnosis
The logic trigger test is somewhat self contained but does depend upon the serial input port and the 100 Mhz startable oscillator. The startable oscillator is used for pattern duration and range.  To check the 100 Mhz startable oscillator:
1. Check the enable line toggles during the test.   U84 pin 15
2. Varify that the oscillator is running during the test.   U84 pins 18,19
The logic trigger also provides holdoff for the trigger system. A 50 Mhz free running oscillator is used as the holdoff clock.
1. Verify that the 50 Mhz osc. is running.   U81B pin19
"

Has anyone been there before?
I've tried to scope signals at these pins but those MECL chips are pesky (negative supply) hard to trigger on the signal properly.
Moreover the signals are on only during 'logic trigger" test  which last all but few seconds, is there a way to loop the test so it runs continuously ?
Really appreciate any poiners here.

I've attached pinouts for both chips U81 and U84 , 10H117, 10H105 as they are hard to come by for PLLC20 package.

[alpher]

Decided to start from scratch, used 3.5 rec.iso and ghosted the image on another CF card, everything goes peachy till I reboot the scope.
It starts to load win98 then right away flashes DOS error message to the tune "error writing device PRN, abort , retry, fail" ?
 
At this moment I cannot even type, keyboard seems to locked up.
Has anybody encounter such a thing?
Could be that the 3.5rec.iso from Tony's archive is corrupted somehow?
I'm honestly stumped. 

[alpher]

Short update, the "cannot write to PRN" error occurred for me on 2 motherboards, an Intel ZX chipset and Via VP3 . Somehow managed to install 3.5 recovery on Intel i810 mobo without hiccup. Unfortunately my conclusion is that something must be borked on my acqusition board. Managed to probe the signals on both the ECL chips (U81, U84) and they're there during the test.
Still all 4 channels fail on logic and pattern trigger, doesn't matter the mobo, be it i810 and software ver. 3,5 or ZX chipset  and soft. 4.3 or 4.5, the result is the same.

So if someone has an extra A13 acqusition board, preferably cheap one, without FISO's or attenuators , as mine are working fine, I'' be willing to buy or trade for something else ( have a couple of sets of A5, A6 boards, maybe other stuff).
Thanks again.

[nctnico]

Did you take the acquisition board out and inspect it? On mine one of the chips came loose. Be sure to work in an ESD safe environment otherwise you might do more damage than good.

[alpher]

I did take it out a couple of times, didn't see anything obvious even under a magnifying glass. Without any more board level info I don't think that there is a chance of repair.

[charlyd]

Here are the screenshot where analogRF askes for in post #363, sorry just came across this post.  Like NCTnico said don t forget to first default the bios settings.

screenshots are from a repaired 54845A (FIC VA-503A)

[JDubU]

I think that "error writing device PRN, abort , retry, fail" is a Windows boot problem, probably associated with the motherboard BIOS settings and not with the scope electronics.
It can occur when a DOS program is trying to print to the default printer and there is no device to print to.  In DOS days, printing was done to a parallel port so make sure that the parallel port is enabled in the BIOS.

[alpher]

I've ordered a used acquisition board on eBay, we'll see when it comes.

[alpher]

Now I've had time to sober up, I've finally managed to put my 54845A project back together. Replacing the acquisition board fixed the logic trigger issues that i had.
The board I bought on ebay came with a full set of A/D converters(FISOs) but no attenuators. No problems for me as attenuator assemblies on my original A13 board were fine, passing all the selftests. Luck had it that 3 out of 4 FISOs calibrated without an issue, only channel 3 wouldn't. It will pass all the self tests but would fail the self calibration routine. As I couldn't find a way to try to calibrate only one channel and the whole calibration routine is quite long, I'm not sure if this was a defective A/D converter or the socket. I did try to clean the contacts on the chip and the socket it didn't help, so I just replaced chip and socket from my original board.
After that it all went smoothly, scope passed all the selftests and calibrated just fine.
Upgraded the OS first to windows98SE then windows ME, mostly to get a decent USB support as I also installed a supermicro slimline USB panel instead floppy drive.
A ha, forgot to mention that the scope runs now of 8GB CF card mounted on the rear bracket  and the mobo is an intel ZX chipset with P3 933MHz, and 512MB ram, quite a decent machine for win ME.
I'm running the scope application with /noram /internal parameters as it seems to be booting much faster this way, gone is also config.sys with the ramdrive.
All in all doing away with ramdrive cuts the boottime by~30%, switching to windows ME cuts that still in half. 
Anyway now that its all done I'm left with quite a bit of extra parts, if any one is interested I have :

one A13 acqusition board  with 3 good FISO's and one most likely bad (there is a slim chance it could be a socket), no attenuators. (it has that logic trigger issue)

2 x A5 boards that I burned during testing and consequently repaired once I got my hand on a supply CT t65550 chips. both running fine .

2 x A6 interface boards also running fine, got them together with the A5 boards, on one of them I had to replace 60 pin connector , couldn't find the original so I installed just the .05" 60 pin header and it works fine.

Plus misc other small items here and there, some MECL chips and couple of CT vga chips as well.

 

[alpher]

Couple more pics:

[Xtremexp]

Hello all,

I also joined the club to repair 54845A. Thanks to the forum members, My unit was failing ADC and FISO tests on one channel, I removed the ADC and found one pin supressed, I cleaned and reinstalled ADC module and the error went away.
I have VIN:025, motherboard has two USB port header, enabled USB in BIOS and installed drivers for USB mass storage. Now I can use USB. this is good.
I cloned HDD, if someone needs anything then I can provide it.

My next goal is to replace HDD so that I have backup plan if I mess something and break software.

I want to add USB test option, has anyone tried to add USB test option on these units? How to install it? I feel like this instrument is very basic, I am looking if there are any way to make this machine worth these days.

Thanks!

[BoscoLab]

Hello,

I have an HP 54845A with software revision A.02.51 and an Agilent 54832B with software revision A.01.10. I am looking for the latest software revision for both. Preferably a direct image which I can copy to a CF card. Who can provide me with a ready installed image for 54845A and 54832B?
 
I have tried to install the ISO I found here on 54832B. Always with the error 0x0B read fault, the ISO is corrupted.  On the 54845A I can't find a way to boot from CD. 

It would be a great help if someone can provide me with a suitable image with the latest revisions for both devices. 

Thank you!

[Tony_G]

I can't help you with a CF card image but I was able to boot and upgrade my 54845A using the images in the OneDrive link I shared earlier by getting a MicroSolutions Backpack Parallel Port CDROM drive:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/204549289902?hash=item2fa01677ae:g:1QMAAOSws7NlXS6X

Note: I have no idea who this EBay user is or if the drive works, I just grabbed the link as it was the same as the one I bought.

You might also be able to boot it using an IDE CDROM drive but I didn't have one of those and, at the time, the cost was the same for the parallel one as an internal IDE one.

As for the 54832B, I can't really help there as I don't have one and so I never checked those ISO files when I grabbed the folder off the HP FTP site

I'm sorry that I can't be more helpful.

TonyG

[alpher]

Here's a link to my images of my 54845A , windows ME images are based on Intel I810 chipset mobo installs.
Theres one with the version 45 (latest that I know of) but I think it's win98 on an original AMD mobo, I did not like it as far as I remember.
Hope it will be of some help.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1w3_B7vnozDZKYdfuwL9VvBMuRDxwnoF2?usp=sharing

[BoscoLab]

I can't help you with a CF card image but I was able to boot and upgrade my 54845A using the images in the OneDrive link I shared earlier by getting a MicroSolutions Backpack Parallel Port CDROM drive:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/204549289902?hash=item2fa01677ae:g:1QMAAOSws7NlXS6X

Note: I have no idea who this EBay user is or if the drive works, I just grabbed the link as it was the same as the one I bought.

You might also be able to boot it using an IDE CDROM drive but I didn't have one of those and, at the time, the cost was the same for the parallel one as an internal IDE one.

As for the 54832B, I can't really help there as I don't have one and so I never checked those ISO files when I grabbed the folder off the HP FTP site

I'm sorry that I can't be more helpful.

TonyG

Hello Tony,

can you tell me how you updated your 54845A? Which files did you have to use and in which order? Maybe you can document the update process?

Thank you! 

[BoscoLab]

Here's a link to my images of my 54845A , windows ME images are based on Intel I810 chipset mobo installs.
Theres one with the version 45 (latest that I know of) but I think it's win98 on an original AMD mobo, I did not like it as far as I remember.
Hope it will be of some help.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1w3_B7vnozDZKYdfuwL9VvBMuRDxwnoF2?usp=sharing

Hello alpher,

thanks for the files. I think Windows 98 is the right way to go for the 54845A. What is the difference in your images between "43 A w98SE only c" and "43 A w98SE" ?

Thank you! 

[Tony_G]

UPDATE: I just watched my video again and realized that my initial memory was faulty - I've updated the post to reflect that.

Hello Tony,

can you tell me how you updated your 54845A? Which files did you have to use and in which order? Maybe you can document the update process?

Thank you! 

Happy to.

As I mentioned above, I grabbed the MicroSolutions Backpack Parallel Port CDROM as this is what was recommended by Agilent in the doc "InfiniiumUpgradeRecovery.pdf".

To upgrade your non-LS-120 scope to A.04.xx, you will need the A.04.xx upgrade software on CD and the appropriate boot disk on a 3.5” floppy. You may contact Agilent technical support for copies of these disks, or download the files at the locations given below. The boot disk supports the MicroSolutions model 167550 Backpack CD-ROM drive. You may need to modify the files for compatibility with your drive.

There is a floppy disk image that I created - It is called "Bootimage.ima" - I used WinImage to write that to a 3.5" floppy and then I could boot the device with the Backpack installed and access the upgrade image. I would expect that you could use an IDE CDROM drive instead of the Backpack, you'll just have to have the right drivers in config.sys & autoexec.bat on the boot disk. Other than those files it is just a standard Win98 boot floppy.

To get to A.04.50, you need to start with A.04.30 and then upgrade that with the A.04.50 files.

The files you need to start with are in the "54845A\54845A\548xx\Upg_Rec\4_3\4_3_Recovery" folder. The files in those folders need to be burnt to CD, you can just use the standard Windows method to burn them as they aren't bootable. I put all the files from Disk 1-3 onto the one CD I think.

Once you have them in the drive you run Ghost.exe from the CD and select the HP548RCV.GHO" file. Ghost (this is just a drive imaging tool) will push the new bits onto the disk and you should be at A.04.30.

I actually have a video of what I did to do the reinstall/upgrade on YT:

https://youtu.be/L49qug1oGuo?si=sh1auQQ3c-b901NC&t=536

Now to get to A.04.50 I used the CDROMUPG.EXE utility - This is in the ZIP folder "54845A\54845A\548xx\Upg_Rec\bootdisk\CD_Boot.zip".

I really don't remember what files it looked for but I would start with the ones in "54845A\54845A\548xx\Upg_Rec\4_5\4_5_upg.zip". These have unique filenames so you should just be able to get them onto the same CD you used for A.04.30. Boot from the floppy again, run CDROMUPG.EXE and then follow the prompts.

I covered that in this video:

https://youtu.be/x9FUXcWENoU?si=lNKwF6aCO14yqmsr&t=142

This is all from rewatching my videos and memory so my apologies if I've missed a step but it should be fairly straight forward.

Hope this helps.

TonyG

[alpher]

Hello alpher,

thanks for the files. I think Windows 98 is the right way to go for the 54845A. What is the difference in your images between "43 A w98SE only c" and "43 A w98SE" ?

Thank you! 

Only c means that there are no other drives like CDrom in this image it was step by step process, you can ignore it and go for the latest.

[BoscoLab]

UPDATE: I just watched my video again and realized that my initial memory was faulty - I've updated the post to reflect that.

Hello Tony,

can you tell me how you updated your 54845A? Which files did you have to use and in which order? Maybe you can document the update process?

Thank you! 

Happy to.

As I mentioned above, I grabbed the MicroSolutions Backpack Parallel Port CDROM as this is what was recommended by Agilent in the doc "InfiniiumUpgradeRecovery.pdf".

To upgrade your non-LS-120 scope to A.04.xx, you will need the A.04.xx upgrade software on CD and the appropriate boot disk on a 3.5” floppy. You may contact Agilent technical support for copies of these disks, or download the files at the locations given below. The boot disk supports the MicroSolutions model 167550 Backpack CD-ROM drive. You may need to modify the files for compatibility with your drive.

There is a floppy disk image that I created - It is called "Bootimage.ima" - I used WinImage to write that to a 3.5" floppy and then I could boot the device with the Backpack installed and access the upgrade image. I would expect that you could use an IDE CDROM drive instead of the Backpack, you'll just have to have the right drivers in config.sys & autoexec.bat on the boot disk. Other than those files it is just a standard Win98 boot floppy.

To get to A.04.50, you need to start with A.04.30 and then upgrade that with the A.04.50 files.

The files you need to start with are in the "54845A\54845A\548xx\Upg_Rec\4_3\4_3_Recovery" folder. The files in those folders need to be burnt to CD, you can just use the standard Windows method to burn them as they aren't bootable. I put all the files from Disk 1-3 onto the one CD I think.

Once you have them in the drive you run Ghost.exe from the CD and select the HP548RCV.GHO" file. Ghost (this is just a drive imaging tool) will push the new bits onto the disk and you should be at A.04.30.

I actually have a video of what I did to do the reinstall/upgrade on YT:

https://youtu.be/L49qug1oGuo?si=sh1auQQ3c-b901NC&t=536

Now to get to A.04.50 I used the CDROMUPG.EXE utility - This is in the ZIP folder "54845A\54845A\548xx\Upg_Rec\bootdisk\CD_Boot.zip".

I really don't remember what files it looked for but I would start with the ones in "54845A\54845A\548xx\Upg_Rec\4_5\4_5_upg.zip". These have unique filenames so you should just be able to get them onto the same CD you used for A.04.30. Boot from the floppy again, run CDROMUPG.EXE and then follow the prompts.

I covered that in this video:

https://youtu.be/x9FUXcWENoU?si=lNKwF6aCO14yqmsr&t=142

This is all from rewatching my videos and memory so my apologies if I've missed a step but it should be fairly straight forward.

Hope this helps.

TonyG

I was able to successfully restore the 54845A to version 4.3 with a new CF card.  When Windows boots the first time, drivers are installed and a crash occurs, but after a reboot it continues.
I could not perform the update to 4.5. The cdromupg.exe did not find any files. I tried everything but it did not work.

I've made good progress so far. Maybe we can still solve the update problem. 

Now I'm just looking for the latest software for the 54832B.

Thank you Tony!

[Tony_G]

Ok, that took way longer to work out than I expected...

My scope is in a 19" rack mount so I can't easily get to the back of it without moving a bunch of stuff - BTW The scope mount looks great and the little pull-out is a touchpad for the mouse:



Anyway, I ran up a Win98SE VM to test it out - Needed to work out how to get Win98 and the latest VMWare to work together, needed to address the TLB bug (The solution is Patcher9x if you're interested), deployed the 4.3 scope GHO, patched it and then tried to jog my memory to work out how to run CDROMUPG.

Ended up just opening the CDROMUPG.EXE file in a binary editor and trolling the resource strings - What did I find? Well, it turns out that the HP devs hardcoded the file locations and expect the CDROM to be drive F: (there are also other locations like the one TheSteve pointed out earlier in the thread).

Anyway, if you make your CD the F: drive then you can just have the files in "54845A\54845A\548xx\Upg_Rec\4_5\4_5_upg.zip" in the root of the iso (basically at F:\) and then you can run CDROMUPG and it should update the device to A.04.50.

I still can't get the scope image to finish booting but I'm fairly certain this is because it is a VM.

Hope this helps.

TonyG

[Tony_G]

Hey All,

For anyone coming here in the future, I've created a single ISO that contains:

• HP Scope Recovery Image A.04.30 (use ghost.exe to restore the image)
• HP Scope Upgrade to A.04.50 (load the mouse driver and run cdromupg.exe)
• Floppy Boot Image with MicroSolutions Backpack Drivers (I use WinImage to write these boot images to a floppy)
• Floppy Boot Image for Windows 98 SE (this is just the standard disk from the Win98 product)
• Patcher9x-0.8.50 Boot Image to patch Win9X to work in a VM or more modern CPU hardware)

The file is "HPScope4X.iso" and you can get it directly here or from the link I shared earlier in this thread.

Hope this helps.

TonyG

[Tony_G]

Now I'm just looking for the latest software for the 54832B.

Did you try the recovery ISO at "54845A\548xx\Upg_Rec\5483x" - 5483XRecovery2_1.iso?

If you did, then unfortunately I can't help further as I never had one of those scopes to try it on.

Sorry.

TonyG

[BoscoLab]

Now I'm just looking for the latest software for the 54832B.

Did you try the recovery ISO at "54845A\548xx\Upg_Rec\5483x" - 5483XRecovery2_1.iso?

If you did, then unfortunately I can't help further as I never had one of those scopes to try it on.

Sorry.

TonyG

I have successfully used the recovery ISO at "54845A\548xx\Upg_Rec\5483x" - 5483XRecovery2_1.iso on the Agilent 54832B. Then booted the update directly from CD and installed it. Here is a screenshot after the installation and update. The self-test and calibration was successful.

Thanks Tony!

[Tony_G]

Congrats - Did you get the 54845A up to A.04.50 as well?

TonyG

[BoscoLab]

Congrats - Did you get the 54845A up to A.04.50 as well?

TonyG

I have not yet updated the 54845A. Could I change the CD drive letter to F after booting the floppy disk? Or do you suggest something else?

Rudolf

[Tony_G]

You can just change the drive letter used by MSCDEX in autoexec.bat - "/L:F" will mount the drive to F: - You might be able to use "assign" to redirect F: to the cdrom drive but it really is just easier to change the letter in autoexec.

I would simply write the Win98SE boot disk image to a floppy, change the letter to F, boot, and run cdromupg - You don't need to change anything on the device, just the boot floppy. You can then reboot and go back to whatever config you want.

TonyG

[BoscoLab]

I finally finished the update on the HP 54845A, now it has A.04.50. Thanks for the help! 

Rudolf

[Tony_G]

Good to hear - Glad I could help.

TonyG

[ARF]

I'll update the topic. I recently received 54845A. At first glance, everything works, but during calibration I received an error on one channel. Any advices? I remember that in 54820 oscilloscopes it was necessary to clean the sockets for ADC modules.

[nctnico]

You can try and clean the sockets but it is also possible the input module is defective.

[ARF]

So far I have not taken any action. Yesterday I just went to bed, and today I repeated the calibration and received errors on all channels. It looks like there is some problem with the calibration signal itself.

[nctnico]

Did you connect the calibration cables? If yes, then try a different BNC cables. BNC cables are prone to failure.

[ARF]

Yesterday I started by doing a selftest and the selftest passed well. After that I tried to do the calibration. Calibration failed on the channel 3.

In the morning I tried to repeat the calibration, but got errors everywhere. I repeated the selftest and got a trigger logic error. Not happy.